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Erschienen in:
2022 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
Playing Against Extinction: “The Dreaded Comparison” and the Distribution of the Human in Mlima’s Tale
verfasst von : Abby Schroering
Erschienen in: Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis
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Abstract
The climate change and extinction crises are—above all—crises of values. World leaders, CEOs, and other humans in positions of power largely understand the science behind climate change and the structural changes necessary to address it, but thus far the popular and political will necessary to enact those changes has been lacking. This crisis of values is one which the arts and humanities seem especially suited to address given their wide-reaching capacity to shape public discourse. However, the paradox at the heart of ecologically oriented artistic practice is that the artists are (almost always) humans, and they are therefore liable to reproduce the same destructive anthropocentrism that has led to our collective emergency.
This paradox seems especially difficult to negotiate in literature—whose historic reliance on written language inextricably intertwines it with human-centric logic—and even more difficult in dramatic literature, which almost always assumes the central presence of the human body at the heart of the text and performance. How can a form so bound up with the idea of the human speak to something like the sixth mass extinction without reproducing the destructive anthropocentric logic that led to it? There have been attempts to index the nonhuman in Western dramatic literature and practice since at least ancient Greek tragedy (from the Greek tragōidia, meaning “goat song”). However, as scholars like Una Chaudhuri, Kari Weil, and Nicholas Ridout have shown, most attempts to represent the nonhuman animal in the theater result in the animal’s interpellation into anthropocentric systems of meaning-making, therefore reproducing the animal as a symbol or tool for human (mis)use. Not to mention, in practice, bringing animals onstage often raises ethical concerns about their welfare, which blurs the boundaries between a piece’s “meaning” and its material reality.
This chapter analyzes Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Mlima’s Tale (2018) as an intervention into the representation of the nonhuman animal facing extinction. The play follows Mlima, a “big tusker” elephant, as he is hunted, killed, and bought and sold through the global ivory market. Much of the media surrounding the premier described the play as a “problem play” in which Nottage is trying to “save the elephants,” classifying the project as yet another attempt to cultivate spectators’ empathy by highlighting and anthropomorphizing the plight of a mediagenic endangered species. However, as this analysis of both the play-text and the original production will show, Mlima’s Tale is not—primarily—about “saving the elephants”; rather, it is working to highlight and deconstruct the means by which the social category of “human” is distributed across beings.
The play makes no attempt to realistically represent an elephant onstage. Instead, a black man (in every production so far) performs Mlima such that the play draws what Marjorie Spiegel has called “the dreaded comparison” between human and animal slavery. In doing so, the play illuminates new networks of responsibility and response-ability (Haraway) between human and nonhuman animals, new opportunities for cross-species assembly (Butler), and new ways of imagining extinction and its consequences.