Lethal theatre: Performance, punishment, and the death penalty

Theatre Journal

Volumn 54, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 339-367

  Conquergood, Dwight ^a,b,c  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Graduate Studies ^*

^c Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27944435810     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2002.0077     Document Type: Review

References (119)

1. These are the last words of Napoleon Beazley, a young African American man, who was executed in Huntsville, Texas, May 28, 2002. His last words are posted on the web site of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
2. Albert Camus, "Reflections on the Guillotine," Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1960]), 234
3. John Whitley, the warden responsible for directing executions at Louisiana's Angola State Prison, quoted in Ivan Solotaroff, The Last Face You'll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 34
4. Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 242
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979 [1975])
6. There are several excellent books that track this history: Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002)
7. Hugo Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
8. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Jesse Jackson, Jr., and Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future (New York: New Press, 2001)
9. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions (New York: Morrow, 2000)
10. See also Thomas Laqueur, "Festival of Punishment," London Review of Books, 5 October 2000: 17-24
11. Gary Wills, "The Dramaturgy of Death," New York Review of Books, 21 June 2001: 6-10
12. The most authoritative source for updated data on the death penalty is the Death Penalty Information Center, Washington, D.C. Their excellent web site address is http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/
13. See John D. Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 146
14. See especially Banner, The Death Penalty
15. The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, Military Order: Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism, 13 November 2001
16. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)
17. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966)
18. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973)
19. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969)
20. and From Ritual to Theeatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982)
21. Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
22. See also Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
23. and Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1.997)
24. For important studies of political rituals, see Katherine A. Bowie, Rituals of National Unity: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)
25. David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988)
26. Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
27. For a historical case study of execution rituals, see Mark Feamow, "Theatre for an Angry God: Public Burnings and Hangings in Colonial New York, 1741," Drama Review 40, T150 (1996): 1.5-36
28. Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 48
29. Robert Johnson, Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process, 2nd ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1998), 20
30. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36-37
31. See also Scheduler's The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993)
32. For pathfinding analyses of the processual and improvisatory dynamics of ritual see Nicholas B. Dirks, "Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact," in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton. University Press, 1994), 483-503
33. Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, and Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)
34. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 6
35. See also Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978)
36. John R. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990)
37. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hieracrchy in America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
38. Cotton Mather, Faithful Warnings to Prevent Fearful Judgments. Uttered in a Brief Discourse, Occasioned, by a Tragical Spectacle, In a Number of Miserables Under a Sentence of Death for Piracy (Boston: printed and sold by Timothy Green, 1704)
39. John Dunston, quoted in Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts, 1620-1692: A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon, 1966), 295
40. Wayne Minnick, "The New England Execution Sermon, 1639-1800," Speech Monographs 35 (1.968): 80
41. Theatre historian Peter G. Buckley concurs: "Of all colonial ritual, executions drew the largest crowds."
42. See Peter G. Buckley, "Paratheatricals and Popular Stage Entertainments," in The Cambridge History of American Theatre I, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 428
43. Cotton Mather, A Sorrowful Spectacle. In Two Sermons, Occasioned by a Just Sentence of Death, on a Miserable Woman, for the Murder of a Spurious Offspring. The One Declaring, The Evil of an Heart Hardened, under and against all Means of Good. The Other Describing, The Fearful Case of Such as in a Suffering Time, and much more such as in a Dying Hour, are found without the Fear of God (Boston: printed by T. Fleet & T. Crump, 1715)
44. and "The Design of Public Executions in the Early American Republic" in Masur, Rites of Execution, 25-49
45. See also Ronald A. Bosco, "Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon," American Quarterly 30 (1978): 156-76
46. Daniel E. Williams, "'Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theater of Mercy': The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England," American Quarterly 38 (1986): 827-47
47. John Rogers, Death the Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent: Life the Sure Reward of Grace to the Penitent: Together with the only Way for Youth To avoid the former, and attain the latter. Delivered in Three Lecture Sermons; Occasioned by the Imprisonment, condemnation and Execution, of a Young Woman, who was guilty of Murdering her infant begotten in Whoredom (Boston: Printed by B. Green and T. Allen, 1701), 147
48. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993)
49. Rogers, Death the Certain, 144
50. For important historical studies of Puritan culture, see Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
51. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989)
52. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981)
53. Samuel Danforth, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into: Upon Occasion of the Arraignment and Condemnation of Benjamin Goad, For his Prodigious Villany. Together with a Solemn Exhortation to Tremble at Gods Judgements, and to Abandon Youthful Lusts (Cambridge: printed by Marmaduke Johnson, 1674)
54. On "performative metaphors," see James Fernandez, Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)
55. On "interpretive communities," see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)
56. John Williams, Warnings to the Unclean: In a Discourse from Rev. XXXI. 8. Preacht at Springfield Lecture, August 25th. 1698. At the Execution of Sarah Smith (Boston: Printed by B. Green and J. Allen, 1699), 7
57. Williams, Warnings, 12, 37
58. For important works on spectatorship see Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988)
59. Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999)
60. See Thomas W. Laqueur, "Crowds, Carnival, and the State in Early English Executions, 1604-1868," in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, James M. Rosenheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 305-55
61. Danforth, The Cry of Sodom, i
62. Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 55
63. See Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)
64. Leigh B. Bienen, "A Good Murder," in The Death Penalty in America, ed. Hugo Bedau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 319-32
65. G. W. Peck, "On. The Use of Chloroform in Hanging," American Whig Review 8 (1848): 283-97
66. Peck opens with an extended "essay on manners" and does not even mention capital punishment until page 292, ten pages into the essay. Peck is much more interested in the everyday performativity of class-manners, deportment, refinement, cultivation of speech and gesture - than he is in the cultural performance of executions. His essay resonates with other elocutionary texts of the period. For a discussion of the class and racial exclusions upon which the elocutionary movement was based, see my "Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other Figures of Speech," Text and Performance Quarterly 20 (2000): 325-41
67. See Johnson, Death Work
68. See Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997), 187
69. On the massive incarceration campaign and prison building boom, see Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998)
70. Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation (New York: Random House, 2001)
71. Marc Mauer and The Sentencing Project, Race to Incarcerate (New York: Free Press, 1999)
72. Christian Parenti, Lockdawn America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999)
73. Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 1994), 435-36
74. See David Johnston, "Ashcroft Delays Death of McVeigh Over FBI's Lapse," New York Times, 12 May 2001, A1
75. See the Center On Wrongful Convictions web site: http://www.law. northwestern.edu/depts/clinic/wrongful/index.htm
76. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 36-41
77. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993)
78. The Death Penalty Information Center is a reliable source for demographic data on the death penalty. See also, Deborah Fins, Death Row USA, Quarterly Report, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, 2002
79. See William S. McFeely, Proximity to Death (New York: Norton, 2000), 69. Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in Utah in 1977, making his the first post-Furman execution. But because he refused all appeals, he was considered a "volunteer."
80. See U.S. General Accounting Office, "Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates Pattern of Racial Disparities," in The Death Penalty in America, ed. Hugo Bedau, 268-74
81. See also Bienen, "A Good Murder," 327
82. Jackson, Jackson, and Shapiro, Legal Lynching, 75
83. For an astute historical analysis of the codependent connection between capitalism and capital punishment, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
84. Stephen Bright, "Counsel for the Poor: The Death Sentence Not for the Worst Crime But for the Worst Lawyer," in The Death Penalty in America, ed. Hugo Bedau, 275-309
85. http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/finalmeal.htm
86. See Mary Douglas, "Food as a System of Communication," in The Active Voice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 82-1.24
87. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)
88. Victoria Brownworth, "Dykes on Death Row," The Advocate, June 1992, 62-64
89. See also Victor Streib, "Death Penalty for Lesbians," National Journal of Sexual Orientation Law 1 (1995): 105-26
90. Richard Goldstein, "Queer on Death Row," Village Voice, March 2001
91. Lifton and Mitchell, Who Owns Death?, 135
92. See Bessler, Death in the Dark, 142
93. For studies of the stress and trauma that executions wreak on the prison staff whose job it is to actually carry out this grisly work, see Donald A. Cabana, Death at Midnight: The Confession of an Executioner (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996)
94. Tonya McClary, "Sexuality and Capital Punishment: The Execution of Wanda Jean Allen," Outfront: Amnesty International's Program for Lesbian, Gay, Bisxual, and Transgender Human Rights, Winter, 2002, 1, 4, 6
95. Robert Bork, quoted in Sarat, When the State Kills, 33
96. Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 226
97. Sarat, When the State Kills, 258
98. Timothy McVeigh's death certificate listed the cause of death as "Homicide." See "Coroner Prepares to Sign Death Certificate," Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 11 June 2001, A6
99. See Jon McKenzie, Perform Or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001)
100. See Frank Bruni and Jim Yardley, "Inmate is Executed in Texas as 11th-Hour Appeals Fail/' New York Times, 23 June 2000, A18
101. See also, Amy Dorsett, "Execution Day," San Antonio Express-News, 22 June 2000, 1A, 8A
102. For scathing critiques of the hypocrisy of sanitized lethal injection as a modern and humane method, See Lifton and Mitchell, Who Owns Death?, 43-69
103. For examples of botched lethal injections, see ibid., 65-66. Bungled executions are so commonplace that the Death Pnealty Information Center documents them under the special topic, "Botched Executions." See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/botched html
104. Modern, executions conflate the three performance paradigms that Jon McKenzie identifies as "the efficacy of cultural performance," "the efficiency of organizational performance," and "the effectiveness of technological performance." See McKenzie, Perform Or Else, 27-135
105. A redacted version of the Execution Protocol is posted on the internet at http://www.thesmokingun.com/archive/bopprotocoll.shtml
106. Quoted in Jackson, Jackson, and Shapiro, Legal Lynching, 113. In 1984, Reagan issued an executive order that reinstated the Military Death Penalty
107. William J. Wiseman, Jr., "Inventing Lethal Injection," Christian Century, 20 June 2001, 6
108. Susan Blaustein, "Witness to Another Execution," in Death Penalty in America, ed. Hugo Bedau (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 387-400
109. Wiseman, Jr., "Inventing," 6
110. See also James Walsh, "The Medicine that Kills: Lethal Injection for Execution," Lancet, 7 February 1998, 441
111. On victims' rights movement, see Wendy Kaminer, It's All the Rage: Crime and Culture (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995)
112. for trenchant critique of the privatization of public discourse, especially the way victims are cast in the role of exemplary citizen, see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1.997)
113. See Mike Doming, "Hundreds Will Watch McVeigh Die," Chicago Tribune, 13 April 2001, 1, 20
114. See Rick Bragg, "McVeigh Dies for Oklahoma City Blast," New York Times, 12 June 2001, A1, A19
115. Lisa Anderson, "In Oklahoma City, Some Feel Cheated by 'Easy' Death," Chicago Tribune, 12 June 2001, 1, 14
116. Anderson, "In Oklahoma City, Some Feel Cheated," 14
117. For an excellent study of the politics of memory and how this played out in the contested process of planning, designing, and building the Oklahoma City National Memorial Center, see Edward T. Linenthal, The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
118. Bragg, "McVeigh Dies," A1
119. "The McVeigh Execution," Chicago Tribune, 12 June 2001, 14