Unbearable intimacies

occupation, utopia, and creative destruction in the fever chart

Adam J. Waterman

pp. 155-167

in: Scott T. Cummings, Erica Stevens Abbitt (eds), The theatre of Naomi Wallace, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

The Middle East offers perhaps the ideal site from which to consider the political and aesthetic commitments of Naomi Wallace's theatre. As the critic Shannon Baley has argued, one of the signal characteristics of Wallace's work has been its engagement with "apocalypses [that appear] … on the edge of utopia … [places] where death and desire coexist, where bodies can be expanded, become fluid, and new horizons can be seen from what is possible" (Baley 2004, 238-9). Coupled with the ambitions of empire, fantasies of apocalypse and utopia have played an inordinate part in the history of the modern Middle East, from the crusader ambitions of Napoleon's armies to the missionary work of Protestant reformers and the "modernizing" projects of Zionist colonialism. Imperial designs upon the greater Middle East have been long underwritten by an explicit sense of millennial purpose, one that identifies the greater Middle East—and Palestine, in particular—as the physical site upon which humanity will meet its eschatological reckoning (Boyer 1994).¹ This dream locates utopia as that which emerges only at the end of secular history, the negation of which intervention in the Middle East is ultimately meant to hasten.

Cited authors

Baley Shannon