Cultural Workers in Distress: Humanitarian Violence,Transnational Advocacy and Burmese Diasporic Organizing in New York

• In Event: The Misery Index: Sites of Resistance and Revitalization in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper takes a necessary approach to scholarship on migration and refugee resettlement and explores how narratives of vulnerability are put to even further use in the arenas of visual, installation and performance art. On New York stages, performances of gagging, silence, binding have become an index to understanding how Burmese exiled artists critique transnational effects of martial law and immigration detainment that operate on their communities in their journeys to resettlement in the United States. I argue that artists simultaneously capitalize upon what I call “elastic vulnerability,” or strategic modes of coming in and out of prostrate states in order to fund themselves and navigate the New York exiled artist scene, a major hub of the international art market and humanitarian industry. However rather than focus on the denial of sentience of human rights subjects this paper examines how artists and activists enlist tactics of complicity, submission and pleasure in their protests of incarceration, immigration detainment and military violence. They forward an alternative politics than relies on the language and reproduction of “misery” for their audiences. However, they also re-appropriate the terms of “miserable existence” in relation to humanitarian crises and international human rights regimes in order to share their experiences of martial law and detainment.

I argue that these forms of protest destabilize normative forms of democratic participation often identified with Western liberal democracy and foreground political arenas that have been traditionally foreclosed to refugee and asylum seeking communities. Drawing from interdisciplinary texts and methods in performance studies, queer studies, diaspora studies, critical humanitarianism this paper also reflects the multiple and intersecting lenses through which we have come to understand contemporary studies of human rights, refugee studies and Southeast/Asian American studies more broadly. In this paper I focus on Burmese diasporic expressive culture within New York NGO initiatives that feature narratives of vulnerability as part of their humanitarian campaigns. I link the performance work of exiled Burmese artists such as Chaw Ei Thein and Htein Lin who famously use blindfolds, gags, and choking on stage to the recent humanitarian advocacy work of New York diasporic initiatives such as myME, a mobile education project targeting underage Burmese teashop workers; as well 3Medium, a Burmese-language rock band that fundraises for medical and educational supplies for internationally displaced persons; and FreeDimensional, an international advocacy and networking resource for “cultural workers in distress.”

Author

• Emily Hue, New York University (NY)