Staging a Christopher Columbus play in a culture of illusion: Public pedagogy in a theatre of genocide

Abstract

In the foreword to The Politics of Genocide, political theorist Noam Chomsky writes that denial of the American Indian holocaust is a potent force in the United States. He argues that 'the most unambiguous cases of genocide' are often 'acknowledged by the perpetrators, and passed over as insignificant or even denied in retrospect by the beneficiaries, right to the present'. That is very true in the United States, where the author of this article discovers that few of his college students know much, if anything, about the capacious genocide of North American Indians. In this article, Brian McKenna explores the power of aesthetic theory and praxis to help overcome the rigid psychological defenses of besieged students. He carefully informs students about the genocide spawned by Columbus and the Spanish, and then draws connections between that history and the history of US Indian genocide and imperialism, up to the present day in Iraq and around the globe. The article presents a five-part exercise, refined over seven years, that shows how McKenna lets the 'truth' dazzle gradually and then thunder mightily in revealing students to themselves. He requires students to imagine themselves as high school teachers where they must produce the written outlines of a play that is based, in part, on the truths of the Spanish genocide as depicted by America's first de facto cultural anthropologist, Father Bartolomé de las Casas. The ultimate aims of the exercise are threefold: (1) Will students, in the politically charged setting of a high school, construct a Theatre of Genocide about the Arawak Indians and the Spanish? (2) Will students draw the educational links between the Spanish and the theatres of war and genocide associated with the United States? And (3) How will students grapple with the pedagogical relationships between knowledge and power; censorship and self-censorship; truth and art? The article also asks, 'Who controls the play curriculum? How can critical public pedagogues challenge the ubiquity of high school productions such as Oklahoma! and Hello, Dolly! to create forms of drama that speak directly to the issues of the day?