9th Global Conference
Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness

Monday 10th March - Thursday 13th March 2008
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Session 10: We Are What We See
Chair: Lois Drawmer

Evil, Good, and Praxis in Liberation Theology and the Theatre of the Oppressed
Richard Piatt
Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom

Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed seeks to transform society by liberating persons from the bonds of oppression, both physical and psychological, through the use of theatrical methods of production. His development of theatre of the oppressed techniques has resulted in grassroots level political action throughout the world aimed at empowering oppressed persons to overcome, if not eradicate, evils suffered.  Latin American liberation theology seeks to address the subject of human suffering among oppressed persons largely by, as Leonardo Boff and others have stated; sociopolitical, hermeneutical, and practical mediation (seeing the reality of the situation, judging the political situation from biblical perspectives, acting in solidarity with the oppressed to stimulate practical change).  Both systems situate and examine acts of evil within particular social settings and both seek systemic change which would eliminate unjust systems of oppression.  Both insist that persons engaged in the work must be willing to join in practical solidarity with the oppressed; to “run the same risks.” Yet, both do so from radically different perspectives.
Boal approaches his subject from the viewpoint of Manichean thought; where good and evil are co-eternal binary forces. He has stated that the Manichean binary is indispensable as the work demands that one take the side of the exploited, and not the exploiter.  Latin American liberation theology addresses evils in society from the point of view of the “crucified people” and in light of the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ.  This viewpoint insists upon the denunciation of structural evils, including within its’ own church, a practical solidarity with the poor and an annunciation of the Good News of the liberation of all human persons and of history itself from the bonds of evil.  This paper seeks to explore the connections between Theatre of the Oppressed and Liberation Theology; how they might engage with each and support each other in their systematic attempts to liberate society from structural evils.

Post-Modern Polyphemus: America, Race, and Panoptic Technique in the New Millenium
Darryl Smith
Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA

From the late 19th to early 20th centuries, it was a fashionable belief that upon the retina of the eye one could locate the indelible image of the last thing seen at the instant of death. Belief in this image—the “optogram”—developed alongside advances being made in photography at the time and took on a vibrant legitimacy owing to its apparent support by the ocular science of the period.
At least three events in the new millennium seminal to black and wider national experience—the corrosive 2000 presidential election, the heinous events of 9/11, and the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina—offer a means of understanding a contemporary expression of what Michel Foucault called “the disciplinary society,” through their materialized continuity with the historical literary trope of the optogram. For in the case of these events, each at their heart entailed the use of some form of optical techné which profoundly conditioned and underwrote the negative conceptual image of blackness that emerged. These include the defamed use of optical scanners in the disenfranchisement of black voters; the ubiquitous cinema of 9/11, which captured for incessant digital review what social philosopher Cornel West described as the “niggerization” of America; and the apparent Archimedean perspectives of the weather-tracking imaging satellites of Katrina. Deployed as they were, I argue that all of these forms of modern optical technique bear the psycho-cultural imprint of a century-old dream of comprehensive—and, indeed, absolute—discipline-utility as evinced in those precursory obsessions with the pseudo-scientific optogram.
Further, I locate the origins of this peculiarly American form of panoptic (pre)occupation in the 21st-century in the 1905 novel, The Clansman—the basis of D.W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation—in which Thomas Dixon, Jr. inaugurates the literary use the optogram but whose trope can also be discerned to variable degrees and ends in the work of figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison.

Download Draft Conference Paper -

Trickster Agenda in the Experience of Evil
Claudia Nielsen
??

© Wickedness.Net 2008