This article was downloaded by: [Charles University in Prague]

On: 11 March 2015, At: 04:09

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Text and Performance Quarterly

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpq20

So Close to Burning: Intermedia and

Documentary Solo Performance in Juan
and John (1965)
Lara D. Nielsen
Published online: 15 May 2014.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Lara D. Nielsen (2014) So Close to Burning: Intermedia and Documentary
Solo Performance in Juan and John (1965), Text and Performance Quarterly, 34:3, 286-303, DOI:
10.1080/10462937.2014.913808
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.913808

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Text and Performance Quarterly

Vol. 34, No. 3, July 2014, pp. 286303

So Close to Burning: Intermedia and

Documentary Solo Performance in
Juan and John (1965)
Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Lara D. Nielsen

When the display of documentary images attenuates solo performance, photography

and other documentary media do not simply supply historical evidence; they tell stories
about, interpret, and delimit horizons of interpretation, rather than prove it. The
pageantry of archival recorded images in documentary performance supplies a silent if
also resounding kind of intermedia genre that plays in relationship to the staged
monologues of solo performance. In a project that aims for forgiveness, redemption,
and healing, Roger Guenveur Smiths first explicitly autobiographical work in
documentary solo performance, Juan and John, revisits the televised 22 August 1965
baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when
Juan Marichal clashed with John Roseboro. The projection of photographs and other
media recordings throughout the performance fix Smiths meditations about the game,
and the 1960s more broadly, as both fact and fiction, in a coming-of-age memoir
that is punctuated by the rhetorical repetitions of the image. While breaking in and out
of remembrances affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to documentary
and other reinscriptions of historical violences, the serial and sequential intermedia
cuts bespeak latent images of historical pasts, at once the burned and burning
instruments for and bearers of memory.
Keywords: Intermedia; Documentary; Performance; Memory; Cultural labor
Roger Guenveur Smith performed his first explicitly autobiographical monologue,
Juan and John, at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre Lab in December 2009. From the
award-winning A Huey P. Newton Story (1997) to Frederick Douglass Now (2009)
and his most recent work in solo performance, Rodney King (2013), Smiths stage
works perform interpretations of people who Smith describes as Americans. Smith
Lara D. Nielsen is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance and Latin American Studies at Macalester College.
Correspondence to: Lara D. Nielsen, Department of Theatre and Dance, Macalester College, 1600 Grand
Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105, USA. Email: lnielsen@macalester.edu.
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) 2014 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2014.913808

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

287

insists, We are in and of America (Fusco and Smith 64), and in Juan and John the
question of racial transcriptions, in an always already transnational America, takes
center stage as the stuff of intermedia convergences, or the interplay of representational genres that layer codes of repetition and difference. Shifting his study of black
radical traditions in the United States to the no less political site (and sights) of
memoir, Smith revisits the heat of the televised 22 August 1965 game between the
San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers, when Juan Marichal infamously
hit John Roseboro on the head with a bat. In 1965, Smith tells audiences, he was so
shaken by what he saw on television that he burned Giants pitcher Juan Marichals
baseball card. Smith was ten years old, loyal to Los Angeles Dodgers catcher John
Roseboro, and working the pedagogies of the 1117 August 1965 Watts Riots: Burn
baby burn. Forty-four years later, Smith returns to the residues of 1965 that never
stop burning, pairing documentary images with autobiographical research. Moving
from televisual and photographic image to memory and spoken performance, Smiths
signature visceral and smoldering sentiment remains the means of connection to the
ways in which the past persists. Rage, regret, and forgiveness do not simply or serially
resolve, as denouement; there is no exit.
As might be expected, it turns out that summoning the evidence of televisual and
photographic documents in performancediscursive objects of representation in
documentary and autobiographical works alikegarners both precious and little
proof. Because photography and other documentary media do not simply supply
historical evidence (they tell stories about, interpret, and delimit horizons of
interpretation rather than prove them), the pageantry of recorded images in
documentary performance reports a silent if also resounding kind of intermedia
intertextuality that plays in relationship to the staged monologues of solo performance. Coined by Dick Higgins in 1965, the term intermedia refers to interdisciplinary
media convergences and immersions that are characteristic of artists working among
and between genres, including performance. Reflecting back on Los Angeles in 1965,
a blaze of feeling shoots intermittently throughout Smiths idiosyncratic and tender
work to make the past and present palpably, persistently, immersively framed in (and
as) the lived now. Smith remembers the ballgame in relation to his childhood
experience of the Watts Riots:
I had just been in front of my family business on Western Avenue and saw other
businesses being burned down firsthand and hearing people scream burn baby
burn. And when Marichal hit my hero upside the head with his bat I burned his
baseball card and said burn baby burn. And so that was the great traumatic event
of my childhood. Now fast-forward to 1992 and I am a young adult and guess
what? Boom! Los Angeles is on fire again! (Gagnier)

In everyday violences as well as those made into spectacle, Sadiya V. Hartman

suggests that the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness
and spectator is at issue (4). For Smith, breaking in and out of remembrances
affective repertoires offers a technique for resistance to the representational

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

288 L. D. Nielsen

reinscriptions and violences that Hartman warns against, which can predictably fix
and frame events, as well as bear witness to them.1
Formally, Smiths performance is driven by an experience of documentary images
he remembers, projects, and reperforms on the stage. The act of looking backward at
historical images to compose the work of documentary solo performance mimics and
constructs, in photographic terms, a viewfinder: a seeing apparatus through which
the artist looks to produce visual compositions. Smith frames public pasts as
intimately felt ones, then and now. At issue in Juan and John, then, are the
intermedia interpenetrations, or cuts, between the recorded scenes of violence Smith
projects onto the stage, and the polyphonous productions of so many and
multitudinous viewfinders; or in other words, the way intermedia productions frame
the political horizons, landscapes, and architectonics of lived experienceand in a
performance that is also a living memoir. The key mediated moments for staging
Juan and John are the Watts Riots; the baseball game at San Franciscos Candlestick
Park; and Smiths private childhood spectre of that smiling face going up in flames,
when he burned Marichals card in Los Angeles. As markers and memories, the
moments to which Smith returns supply acts of grievance and resistance. They are
both everyday and spectacular, and Smith repeatedly shows them in his performance
by remembering them, reenacting them, talking about them, and projecting recorded
images associated with them onto the stage.
Smiths craft does not present the dispassionate voice of objective documen
tary theatre as Peter Weiss did in another context, in The Investigation (1965).
Smith does not report verbatim theatre, and does not work from the transcripts of
oral testimony. Crucially, then, Juan and John is not driven so much by the
recorded word as it is by the remembrances of visual and televisual culture. An
ekphrastic dynamic thus guides Smiths performance in Juan and John, wherein
the narration and soundings of memory speak with and for the no less talkative
photographic images of the past. Photographs, televisual images, gesture, music,
memories, and the speaking voice sustain and transform the performance, a
layering technique for reconstituting pasts for the imagined present through
memory and rememory (Morrison). Whether as actor or audience, this practice is
particularly emphatic in solo performance and performance art, slippery categories
in which performers and audiences meet through the affective media (and
intermedia) of the embodied, corporeal, and ever-mattering individual
(see Piper; Gray; Hughes and Romn; Bonney; Oliver). But while Smith is rightly
known as a shape-shifting actor (Fusco and Smith 61), Juan and John
necessitates considering the materiality of performance differently, less as the
exclusive index of Smiths transcendent presence or absence as an actor, but more
as an engagement with the intermedia frames, convergences, and viewfinders he
assemblesand it is in those framing devices that Smiths performance is both an
opening and open to the work of documentary solo performance, querying
citations, and theorizing cultural labor.

So Close to Burning

289

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Citations
Juan and John opens with Smiths silent and slow-motion imitation of Marichals
inimical pitch: his windup, release, and follow-through. A video recording of
Marichals performance is transposed onto the low-lit stage as Smith silently breathes
through the movements of the pitch. Watching the two at the same time signals the
difference between Smiths theatrical representation and recordings of Marichals
performance; audiences perceive each as independent forces. Smiths act of
surrogation is thus intentionally citational, fragmentary, and inventive, insofar as
Smith does not attempt to duplicate the seriality of any one game, or to narrate
Marichals experience on the mound. If the slow-motion imitation of Marichals
pitch is not quite adulation (an affection reserved for Roseboro, Smiths childhood
hero), it is a form of recognition, and one with an edge. Implicitly, Smiths
performance demands attention to the polyphonous reproductions of visual
culturefrom the projections of the televisual image, to the staged performance, to
the photograph.
Always seeing Marichal through the lens of US national anglophile cultural
narratives, Smith introduces Juan as the Dominican Dandy, the moniker
mainstream US presses assigned him, and which he sometimes autographed on
photographs, baseballs, and other Major League Baseball (MLB) memorabilia.
Breaking the fourth wall at the Public Theatre prior to the performance to introduce
the work, Smith also worked hard to welcome that Dandys widow and family, who
attended the opening night of Juan and John, staging them as key participants in the
project of remembering August 1965. Simultaneously the year of the Voting Rights
Act and the US invasion of the Dominican Republic (the United States also began
sending troops to Vietnam in 1965), the stories of 1965 mark just some of the
historical convergences of African diaspora in the Americas, and beyond. Keeping it
personal, Smith told audiences that he honored Marichals family every night of the
performance. The night I attended, Smith acknowledged another prominent
Dominican, novelist Junot Daz, sitting in the front row of the small theatre. The
staging of Juan and John occasioned yet more public acts of reconciliation and
solidarity than the ballplayers had already cojoined in their lifetimes. It was at
Roseboros behest, fans know, that Marichal was finally slated for a vote into the
MLB Hall of Fame in 1983, the first Dominican (and first Latin American) to win the
honor.
Both fact and fiction, Smith shows what he has seen in the recordings of
Marichals assault on Roseboro, signified in a single black-and-white image projected
onto the stage. More precisely, in the performance Smith shows an experience of
what the image conveys, one that is literally and figuratively both moving and still.
What everyone knows is that at the top of the third inning in the 22 August 1965
game between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers at Candlestick
Park, and after a series of retaliatory GiantsDodgers games in the National League
pennant race, something flippedsomething bad happened. Every attempt to
narrate or explain the moment compromises it, and yet this is what Smith means

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

290 L. D. Nielsen

to do.2 Ten years old, Smith saw the broadcast: Roseboro returned a ball to Sandy
Koufax, close enough that Marichal could hear it. Marichal said it ticked his ear, and
he whirled around to confront Roseboro, spitting rage. Roseboro sent the heat right
back at Marichal, who, in an exceptional loss of cool, beat Roseboro over the head
with his bat. It all happened in a few seconds. Players from both teams sprinted
across the field to home plate. Sandy Koufax ran to protect his catcher (Roseboro).
Willie Mays crossed team lines to help his friend (Roseboro). There was a brawl
and a game delay. Roseboro needed fourteen stitches for his head wound. It was a
Sunday afternoon. In the next decades, lawsuits followed and were abandoned.
Apologies issued forth. Friendship displaced enmity.
Where does one cite or fabricate a point of origin for the resonances of the images
stories? Back to 1865, a period of Civil Wars in the Dominican Republic and the
United States? To the nineteenth-century GiantsDodgers rivalry? To coloniality in
the Americas, writ large? To the racial division of labor that so peculiarly defines the
history of freedom in the United States, and its corollary anti-Haitianismo in the
Dominican Republic? To the Cy Young award-winning pitching competitions of the
1960s (Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson, and Don Drysdale)? To MLB outsourcing the
training and recruitment of Dominican players in the 1960s? To the 1965 National
League pennant race, when (it is rumored) Marichal threw at batters, and Koufax
would not retaliate? To the nine-inning confines of this August 1965 game, when
(Marichal says) Roseboro set him up? (Marichal 128). Is it to the photographic still
that affixes the fight as history? To the digital availability of that one television clip
on YouTube, haltingly repeating a censored and censoring camera recording into
eternity? Or, to all and every prolix potentiality?
Like written and spoken words, documentary images reveal and conceal.
Critiquing the historians habitual deferral of meaning to the events themselves,
as if there were such a thing, Allen Feldman thus understands the event not as what
happened, but what can be narrated (13). In documentary solo performance it is
neither one nor the other, but the surplus accumulation of debts such acts of transfer
incur. In Juan and John, Smith foregrounds an ongoing struggle with and within the
citationality of things by repeating and projecting citational images. It would seem
that the inventions of origins stories are precisely the kind of nut this performance
seeks to crack. No one rhyme or reason will do; and yet, performance cannot but
repeat the violences of both rhyme and reason. As memoir, it is Smiths memory of
the television broadcast that drives Juan and John. Smith is forever situated, in that
scene from the past, as a ten-year-old who knows and cares that Joe Louis and
Roseboro share a birthday, in July; who knows what happened in that game because
he saw it with his own two eyes; and who knows (like Goethe) that the hardest thing
to see is what is in front of your own eyes.
While Smith at ten years old demands recompense for what he saw, the burned
and burning televisual image also animates the force of memory and rememory
forty-four years later in a documentary solo performance that has toured theatres in
the United States and the Dominican Republic. Just as surely, that burning trips up
the act of formulating a history of the present, because in every present, that thing

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

291

will have happened, and will mean something new (Spillers). A televised beating,
live, the recorded scene (seen and unseen) unleashes racial and nativist furies, fuels
labor competitions, and conscripts conflicts between labor and capital. Projecting the
image of Marichals bat raised against Roseboro, Smith overtly reflects on the crosses
of race, class, language, and ethnicity in the United States, and, what they can mean
for players competing in MLBs global labor market in 1965. Smith is at pains to
emphasize that Juan and John means to inspire a meditation on forgiveness,
redemption, and healing. As image-cipher, the scene simultaneously contains and
activates the citation that ignites the live wire of colonial machineries, which means
that it also simulates and refuses the trafficking in appetites for those scenes of
subjection, re-emplotting constellations of transnational citizenship toward a sense
of communion with our cousins. All our friends (Harney and Moten 52).
Photographs
A curated exhibition of photographs pauses audiences before entering the theatre to
see Juan and John at the Public Theatre. The hallway is a vessel of passage converted
into a gallery, simultaneously still and moving in literal and figural senses, a liminal
space for transit into performance and away from it, between the Public Theatre
lobby and the theatre itself. Coding visual rhetorics that situate audience interpretations of the performance in advance, 1965 Yearbook: A Companion Exhibit to Juan
and John offers a spread of images documenting the 1960s. On one wall, there are
photographs of Civil Rights Protests in Alabama, 1963; Mohammed Ali standing
over Sonny Liston, 1964; the assassination of Malcolm X, February 1965; aerial views
of Watts, Los Angeles, during the August 1965 Riots; protests against the war in
Vietnam; the Black Power gesture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the
Olympics, fists high in Mexico City, October 1968. Each photograph interprets and
documents public performances that have made history. Together, they frame and
supply a way of seeing and reading a set of themes that Smith has chosen for the
performance, and, although the images are technically silent, they most certainly
speak. Centered on the opposite wall are a late photograph of Marichal and
Roseboro, friends reconciled, and their early baseball cards, framedbeginnings and
endings duly declared.
During the performance, Smith uses several kinds of recordings to tour the times,
selecting from popular music, photographs, radio and television broadcasts, as well as
family photographs to illustrate and corroborate his storytelling. Smith stands on his
feet as he shares a life history, interposing public and private images as he wanders
his pasts. A family photograph of Transfiguration High School locates Smith in space
and time as a seventh-grade student. From the sky, aerial photographs map Watts,
feigning objectivity like military intelligence. Insinuating the differences between two
such seeing machines, Smith cuts back to street level with a photograph of the family
businessa Los Angeles hotelwhich sparks his grinning quip, Capitalism, thats
the best revenge. And then that grin frowns as Smith is perplexed by what he
perceives to be the generational distance between his California childhood and his

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

292 L. D. Nielsen

daughters. Smith says she is not busy learning about history, be it Watts, 1965, the
Dominican Republic, or baseball, but listening to LilPeaches.
Associating what he takes to be institutionalized amnesia with the burn of napalm,
Smith flashes to 1972, when the United States authorized its use in the Vietnam War.
He projects Nick Uts iconic photograph of Phan Thi Phc in Trang Bang, a girl
running in the terrorizing afterglow of a South Vietnamese chemical weapons attack.
The cut from baseball and daughters in Los Angeles to war games and daughters in
Vietnam makes for a brutal if not gratuitous visual montage. Interspersing so many
fraught and burning images with photographs from Smiths family albums (and
memories of conversations with his daughter), the documentary solo performance
Juan and Johnlike the 1965 Yearbook exhibitinvokes the ethics and the
aesthetics of witness, spectatorship, remembrance, and performance evoking the
aftermath of catastrophe (Hirsch, Generation 104). The performances visual
archive has the effect of repeating and destabilizing the exact evidence it hails.3 For
instance, while Smiths sly declarations about middle-class capitalist success at one
moment can in the next moment rub raw against images from the US war against
communism in Vietnam, the alliterative pairing of his daughter with a girl from
another time and place yet again troubles and exceeds contained narratives about the
political geographies of war zones, records, and their pasts and futures. The indices of
space and time conceal as much as they reveal; wars abroad also turn out to be wars
at home, and long after they are over.
According to Jacques Derrida, photographs are both aphoristic and serial
(Athens 1), which is to say they denote ordered and ordering truths. When Derrida
wonders, what does the photograph bring to light, Avital Ronell rearranges the
question and interprets Derrida as leaving open and ambivalent the question of
whether and how audiences are allowed to view what is being exposed (132). Ronells
insight is pertinent for reading documentary solo performance, as it returns us to a
central question in performance studies: what is made to be seen? In Juan and John,
what does the photograph bring to light for Smith and his audiences? W. G. Sebald
states that for artists in the precarious position of working in a discredited society,
and who do not (cannot) reveal enough about what they saw in it, it is always a
matter of looking and looking away at the same time (ix). There is something of
this reflex in Smiths insistent photograph exposures. For audiences to consider
Smiths gesture of looking and looking away is to slip into that gap postulating the
materials of the document on the one side and those of performance on the other, to
attend to the ways each locates techniques of knowing and theorizing the past, or as
Roland Barthes might say, hallucinating it (115).
Like photography, documentary solo performance appears to offer an experience
and a representation of reality, but at the same time initiates and regulates techniques
for theorizing it (Benjamin; Sontag; Berger; Mitchell What). Resenting the serial and
appropriational rhetorics of the photograph, which can only construe information
(rendering its subjects empty and absent signifiers), Susan Sontag writes, the camera
makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies
interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

293

mystery (23). By contrast, Barthes insists on reader or viewer agency, which is

always fundamentally theatrical, as every photograph is a certificate of presence (5).
Refusing the injunctions of absence and presence alike, Derrida summons the
inscriptions of certification in what is exposed (Athens). The photograph, like any
document, can be decompositional and un-make its status as a subject and object of
history as much as it overdetermines it; each maneuvers situations, performatively. In
the cinematic context, Brian Winston elucidates Griersons documentary as the
creative treatment of actuality, liberated from the predilections of commands and
authorizations defining norms of documentary journalism in favor of its more
phantasmatic fiction-making enterprises (11). In each case the documentary artifact
tempers and tampers with evidence. Skeptical of discourses of absence and
negativity, Derrida seeks to open texts to their prolix alterity (Brunette and
Wills 27).
For many artists who work with the body in performance, the flux of memory is a
resource for resistance against institutionalized knowledge industries and their
medias (Spillers; Pollock). Thus, like so much documentary practice, Juan and John
audiences witness Smiths efforts to participate in and locate himself within the
operations of Derridas parergon (Truth), or, the inside and the outside of those
incendiary knots, rubrics, and flows that frame and make history fluid in its
documentations, dreams, and dementiasthe inside and the outside of those always
shifting conflagrations and their residues. When Smith groans about being
conscripted to read Spalding Gray (he does not mention Higgins), he jabs at the
way US avant-garde performance histories are written as the domain of particular
New York canons of solo and documentary performance (its canons and
conventions), which he nevertheless deliberately envelops into his craft. Standing
plainly on the stage, Smith layers the speech of personal storytelling across an
assemblage of images, sounds, and memorythe quarrel between New York and Los
Angeles schools seen anew, from baseball to performance.
Testing the grounds of theatrical solo performance with documentary media
corralled from family albums, photojournalism, and broadcast television, Smith
remembers watching the ballgame, broadcast from Candlestick Park, in the
chronological afterglow of the riots in Los Angeles. The ballgame and the riots
each posit traumatic disruptions to his middle-class childhood, at once close and far
from home. Taken separately and in conjunction with one another, the events of
August 1965 are evidence for US national antagonisms about race and citizenship felt
locally and globally. For Smith and his audiences, they are the very material stuff of
growing up. For baseball, the game demonstrates emerging tensions in MLBs
particular (and popular) entrepreneurial performance industry, in which the risks
and rewards of the international division of labor was apparent to players and fans
long before theorists linked neoliberalism with the political legacies of the 1960s and
1970s. Performing 1965, Smith moves between memory and archival documentation,
eliciting the mutually constitutive force fields of autobiography and the sanctioned
narratives of history in his effort to stage an affective reckoning with race, nation,
and baseball; with radiance, solidarity, and play.

294 L. D. Nielsen

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Documentary and Performance

Juan and John vividly demonstrates a solo performance approach that is recognizable
for the way it stages the active process in the creation of meaning, foregrounding
affect, subjectivity, and interpretation in relationship to the antiseptic facts
documentation seems to supply. Considering neither history nor sources the
passive depositories of unassailable archival objects, oral historians likewise hear
techniques of remembrance (and rememories) as a process that is authorized by
contingency and constitutes identity (Morrison). Like a night at the theatre, it is never
the same twice (Portelli 39). Like solo performance, the narrator is recognized as one
of the characters, and speaks (41). A participant in the story he tells, documentary solo
performance is Smiths method for staging what will always be a reflective process
between baseball records and publics, for whom something is at stake in remembering
and encountering Juan Marichal, John Roseboro, and 1965. Flaring in and out of
official and family history with affective rhythms and tellings, Smith performs a
process of remembering that foregrounds lived experiences: emotive, tactile, changing,
full of consequenceand finally ambiguous. Collectors and archivists may wince, but
that burned baseball card speaks to another kind of evidence, a burned and burning
document that eludes the usual archivizations of memory and language, making
palpable (if inaccessible) the blaze of their insides and outsides as ashy traceeven as
it mobilizes a story for documentary solo performance.
What links documentary media with performance studies is the groove between
artifice and the real, otherwise known as the boundary between art and life. Ranging
from fictional to empirical data, that groove conjures the possibilities of intermedia
presence and participation, locating performance among other medias that frame and
dislocate the experience of corporeality. In a lively intervention in the debate about
whether documentary media and corporeal performance make the absent body real
and present (or, make its subjects even more absent, the document as a shroud),
Amelia Jones suggests that the body and the document subtly reinstate the authority
of each in the other, as the body is never an unmediated event. Documentary solo
performance hence incurs mediality as the certificate, and as Barthes argues, the very
ambiguous certification of presence (11), which is not finally verifiable, but
nevertheless stages its theatrical claim.4 From the beginning of Juan and John, that
claim was burning.
Documentary solo performance frames and produces historical propositions;
assembling intermedia and viewfinders, it theorizes by connecting selected objects of
evidence in narrative and montage sequences. The materiality of already archived
and authorized evidences repeats and produces difference, revealing its status as
mimetic. It manages what is inside and outside the image and rearranges what is
inside and outside performance. What it domiciles and exiles reveals a logic of
perceptionnot only a representation, recounting, or memory, but also an
intermedia technique for seeing and conceptualizing each. The oscillation between
subject and object is creative. Repeating, refusing, and deconstructing perception in
the admixtures of gesture and evidence, intermedia performance introduces new

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

295

forms of documentary evidence that may not be so readily controlled. If it is

frequently noted, as Jacques Le Goff observes, that today, documents include the
spoken word, the image, gestures (xvii), then it is to make the argument that
documentary performance in turn mediates discursive truth-claims precisely in and
through acts of repetition that produce difference in performance. Hence, Matthew
Reason understands the document, and performance, as complementary modes of
distortional artifice. In Smiths efforts, they literally and figuratively light up and
burn. What I mean to call attention to here is Derridas challenge to studies in
performance, for whom performances ruptures and breaks make it clear that the
body is an experience of frames and dislocations (and so too, disidentifications).
Skeptical of discourses of absence and negativity, Derrida suggests attention be paid
instead to the dissonances of intermedia apertures (Brunette and Wills 27).
As a performer focusing on the hallucinatory authority of intermedia corporeality
in performance (a phenomenological engagement, as Janelle Reinelt suggests), Smith
has documented the 1960s before. In A Huey P. Newton Story, which opened at the
Public Theatre in 1997 (and was made into a Spike Lee film in 2002), Smith channeled
the intellectual traditions and urgencies of black radicalism in his incandescent
performance of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense co-founder, Huey P. Newton.
Taking on Juan and John in a work of autobiographical documentary solo
performance, Smith remembers burning that baseball card, and again needs to make
sense of historical conflagrations. Smith is as aware of baseballs place in the political
imaginary of his childhood as he is of US popular cultures. Thinking Watts 1965
alongside baseball 1965 in an act of linguistic ventriloquism, Smith switches to the
language of Roseboros Dominican counterpart, Spanish, to express the flush
quandaries: Tengo una guerra en mi cabeza (I have a war in my head). He locates
the possibility of a link with Marichal, in other words, through an acoustic register.
Baseball
Crucially, baseball is also a story of labor and performance (see Nielsen Riddle).
MLBs strategy of recruiting foreign national players like Marichal (at lower cost)
increased ownership profit and global market reach at the same time that it retained
tight control of US national domestic players like Roseboro, who were still
controlled by the reserve clause in the 1960s (with the reserve clause, teams reserved
the rights to players even after their contracts ended). It is important to recognize
that Marichal and Roseboro each read as doubling spectres for human resource
management in the global labor economy of the 1960s, a period that is more often
recognized for rights legislation than for the rapidly changing horizons of production
that include workforce efficiency measures. Referencing the lawsuit Roseboro initially
brought against Marichal, for instance, Smith snaps, Angela Davis was Roseboros
lawyer, overtly reading 1965 through the political discourses of Civil Rights Act
struggles of 1964. Smith also reads Roseboro through the spectre of Watts, 1965: a
public response to Los Angeles Police Department violence against the rights of
Marquette and Ronald Frye. Yet like baseball, Watts is also and no less powerfully a

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

296 L. D. Nielsen

sign for the systemic conflict between labor and capital (Robinson). No doubt, 1965
was fluent in competing rights and resources discourses (Nielsen Introduction).
While baseballs monopoly performance industry illustrates shifts in neoliberal
governmentality that most critics date to 1973 (Harvey), players continue to demand
a price for the labor of performance, rejecting property exchange among owners.
To Smiths 1965 Yearbook exhibit, then, and to Juan and John, add another
citational and discursive frame, one clarified by Curt Flood, a Gold Glove center
fielder who played for the St. Louis Cardinals and refused to be traded after the 1969
season. Floods suit against the reserve clause was heard in the US Supreme Court,
but denied in a 1973 ruling, and MLB players did not win free agency until 1975. I
knew ball players got traded like horses, Flood recalls, but I made up my mind that
it wouldnt ever happen again (300). Floods 1969 Christmas Eve letter to MLB
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn read:
after 12 years in the major leagues I do not believe that I am a piece of property to
be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system that
produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the
laws of the United States and of the several States. (236)5

Floods rhetoric is unmistakable: the affirmation of rights rejects the administration

of people as property, the nexus of capital. Kuhn sparred back:
I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property to
be bought and sold. That is fundamental to our society and I think obvious.
However, I cannot see its application to the situation at hand. (83)

A week after Flood and Kuhn sent their letters, in a column titled Curts 13th
Amendment, New York Herald Tribune sports journalist Red Smith joked at Kuhns
expense: You mean, baseball demands incredulously, that at these prices they want
human rights too? The column spins the inequities of baseballs big-money
performance industry with the 13th Amendment (1865), the rise of post-war United
Nations rhetoric about human rights (1948), and the Civil Rights Act (1964). The
indication is that histories of rights and resources management are always
intertwined: the challenge is to recognize their inscriptions across opaque and
certified frames; permeating unofficial and official renderings.6
Always keeping it personal, Smith reports that after Watts, Roseboro came home
to Los Angeles to find his 1963 World Series ring stolen; a few weeks later, Hurricane
Betsy hit New Orleans. Based on historical events, documentary solo performance in
the United States often features the performance of first-person autobiographical
witness (Martin). Of course, performance that reinstates the idea of storyteller as
unambiguous truthteller begs patience, and in this vein Jonathan Kalb observes that
documentary solo performance endorses unfettered individualism (18). The
opportunity, in Juan and John, is to move from the particular to the general, or as
Stokely Carmichael understands it, to conceive the concerns of the individual to
those of a collectivity (46). In his performance, Smith draws out the affective
annotations that make the personal political, at the same time that he remembers and

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

297

projects a distinct set of visual sequences that name and frame 1965, cutting from
Watts; to napalm in Vietnam; to the infiltration of Dominican baseball players in
MLB.7 Audiences might also wish to recall April 1965, when the United States
invaded the Dominican Republic (again), heightening militarized US foreign policy
in the Americasviolences Dominicans (and critics of the US military industrial
complex) are unlikely to forget in the context of any narrative about Juan.
Attention returns, inevitably, to the problem of what is being recorded in the
persistence of such forgetting about shared Dominican and US histories, and the way
such elisions frame Smiths documentary solo performance.
The infraction between Marichal and Roseboro persists as a popular fragment of
memory, a fiction and fantasy (a regret) that at once confirms and explodes the
conduct of the game, chronicling the international division of cultural labor that
makes MLB Dominican (Ruck). In turn, Marichal and Roseboro maneuver grids and
folds of meaning, as they are each made to play the role of rights and resources
exemplar, respectively, in the American national pastime. Like his audiences, Smith
is confronted by and confronts images that document the proverbial scene of
subjection, where crimes are not witnessed but staged (Hartman 8). While the
iconic image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising their black-gloved fists in a
salute to the Olympic Project for Human Rights (and Black Power) at the 1968
Mexico City Olympics performs a quest for civil liberties that mainstream America
reviled for going too far (Edwards), the black-and-white photographic still taken
from the television recording of Marichal and Roseboros clash stages a racially
charged televisual space of voyeuristic trauma, violence, and shame, in that it has
been made to be given to be seen (Young 12).
And this is exactly the rub. In the photograph that Smith projects, and in the
YouTube clip he returns to several times over, Marichal and Roseboro are made to
repeat as citational authors and objects of monstrosity (Sharpe). As a parable in
race and representation, the story of Juan and John could be simply another study of
an old and repeating record that is no less crucial for its repetition. It is clear that
Smith studies the rhetorics of that repetition, and in a reflex that records his
participation in them. Citing Marichals pitch in the opening and closing scenes of
the performance, however, it is important to notice that Smith mimes the act
of shattering records. The conjunction is provocative, for as Derrida observes, acts of
silence and mimicry are redoubling forces:
silent works are in fact already talkative, full of virtual discourses, and from that
point of view the silent work becomes an even more authoritarian discourseit
becomes the very place of a word that is all the more powerful because it is silent.
(Brunette and Wills 13)

Documentary solo performance thus ventures, through gesture, the possibility of

breaking that incessantly muting and immutable mimetic hold; at the same time that
it communicates its foreclosures.
As venerable documentary theatre tradition insists, Juan and John positions
its protagonists as historically located agents of history in a first-person narrative

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

298 L. D. Nielsen

that begs the question of taking sides (Weiss). Fixing Marichal and Roseboro as
monumentalized, known, and knowable national subjects, they are made into
institutionalized and institutionalizing cultural artifacts. Like MLBs Hall of Fame
in Cooperstown, NY, Smiths performed remembrances of Marichal and Roseboro
model Paul Ricoeurs observation that archives constitute the documentary stock of
an institution that produces them, gathers them, and conserves them (117). On the
one hand, Juan and John neatens the flows and transmissions of 1965 baseball
performance by crafting a highly personal reflection of his own life through the
unwavering story of Marichal and Roseboros conflict and friendship. A labor of love,
the performance was attended by Marichal himself, Morgan Fouch Roseboro
(Roseboros daughter), the President of the Dominican Republic Dr. Leonel
Fernandez (19962000, 20042014), and Spike Lee (Burke). That the players,
performers, president, and artists (politicians all) are all present serves simultaneously to animate and domesticate the powers of document and performance alike.
That the Public Theatre advertised the performance as a springboard for discussion
on rage, retribution, and redemption, posits the scene of violence (and inquiries into
postmemory) as an originary point of departure for the work. On the other hand,
Smiths reflexive repetition and seeing of trauma mimics the foibles of colonial
looking. In other words, Juan and John indeed delivers the official history of that
scene rather than its quavering inscriptions at the edge of history (Taussig 209), as
well as the familiar model of political paradox between rights and resources. In each
case, these are poignantly apposite exigencies. Casting them so overtly in their
dualistic and oppositional signifying molds, the historical machineries of repetition
and reproduction are sure to crack. That is Smiths chance, and ours, because the
always already intermedia body in performance is an agential subject and object of
transmission: whether in the ballpark, the photograph, or in performance, it resists
(Moten Magic). Each iteration demands an account of whether and how audiences
are allowed to view what is being exposed, or to hear its burn.
Reverse
The televised clash between Marichal and Roseboro was deemed so dangerous that,
according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dodgers organization ordered the
destruction of the videotape that recorded the game.8 Historians speculate the MLB
sanitized the record (a phrase familiar to those researching carefully controlled US
government documents), fearing the MarichalRoseboro conflict would fan the flames
of the Watts Riots. The Mayor of Los Angeles had invoked martial law and deployed
the National Guard to control Watts, a public demonstration that inspired the wrath of
mainstream media, and politically affirming responses from the Black Panthers and
the Situationists alike (Debord): for staging revolt against the violences of racism and
(spectacular) property relations. The 48-second YouTube recording of the game still
omits part of the action: what it records is but a stutter in the recording, the fraction of
action that censors in order to reveal, an interrupted and interrupting sequence of
black-and-white stills that will not showbut tellswhat is already made to be seen.

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

So Close to Burning

299

It is hard to imagine that Marichal and Roseboro did not also theorize public
images, framings, documentations, hearings, and performances with their own, but
this is not what Juan and John is about. It is a memoir about looking, and looking
back, to locate which viewfinders best accommodate and produce the demands of
intermedia performance, memory, and rememory. To this end it may be helpful to
recall that most baseball fans access the actual performance of the game through its
televised or radio stagings. Years ago, Raymond Williams noted that the televisual
impression of seeing the events for oneself is at times and perhaps always deceptive
(42). In particular, sport broadcasts have increasingly been arranged for television
(61), the live and real performances orchestrated for the camera and its remote
audiences. This televisual pageantry records, for instance, live evidence of Marichal
and Roseboro in performance. At the same time, if televisual documents indeed
produce new excitement, proximity, and visual experience of the simulated real, it
is only to repeat the license and constraints of representational narratives: in seeing,
framing, remembering, and forgetting practices. By means of thoroughly theatrical
stagings of photographs and spectacular televisual broadcasts in the documentary
solo performance Juan and Juan, Smith calls forth into the present and past framing
devices and performances that make history.
So when Smith closes his performance by remembering his daughter saymuch
to his distressI only know you through what you do on the stage, the problem
of documentary fallibility and intermedia frames and assemblages rings close and
true. As a ten-year-old fan, as a performer, as a father, and as a cultural
ambassador, Smith plays to the affinities and affiliations of family that are also
always fraught, and nearly too distant to broach. Replaying the footage of the
Marichal and Roseboro fight brings Smith back to what is, for him, the inaugural
moment of that scorching gaze: 22 August 1965, yet again rehashing the
sequence.9 Even if Roseboro forgave Marichal, Smith says, I couldnt do that
(Hoffarth). In a sense, Smiths burning keeps it real, and it is in light of these
remembered inheritances, this home outside itself (Derrida and Stiegler 132) that
irregular inscriptions, and the spectres of rights and resources, emerge in Juan and
John. Homing in at the end of the American century (18651965), Smiths
meditations on the two legends, Marichal and Roseboro, revisit and reiterate
intermedia and the politics of visibility in documentary solo performance.
Memory, Smith seems to suggest, is both a technology of freedom and a site of
cultural labor that has to be worked through interminably (Mitchell, Picture
Theory 189).
Similarly, in The Work of Fire, Maurice Blanchot writes about the obduracy of
language, in that
it strives for the impossible. Inherent in it, at all its levels, is a connection of
struggle and anxiety from which it cannot be freed. There is no rest, either at the
level of the sentence or at that of the whole work. (22)

Kinetic, restless, and burning, Smith remembers televisual and photographic images
from the past that honor Roseboro, and ventriloquize, or sound out Marichal. The

300 L. D. Nielsen

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

aphoristic and serial framing of the inside and the outside of perception that Derrida
calls parergon (Truth) is what Fred Moten also understands as axiomatic of black
performance (In the Break). Veering among intermedia, affect, photographs, and
memory, Juan and John leaves open and ambivalent the question of whether
audiences are allowed to view what is being exposed. It is as if the assemblages of
documentary solo performance refer spectacle back to the image, in a gesture that
simultaneously authorizes and deflects attention from performance, and its recordings. And it is all, as Smith closes out the performance of Juan and John, so close to
burning.

Notes
[1]

[2]
[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]
[7]

[8]
[9]

While Fred Moten examines acoustic performance, and in relation to commodities [that]
speak (In the Break 11), Hartman emphasizes the visual: I have chosen to look elsewhere
and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned. By defamiliarizing the
familiar I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the
shocking spectacle (4).
He is not the first (see Gerlach).
Marianne Hirsch asks, If these images, in their obsessive repetition, delimit our available
archive of trauma, can they enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath? How
can we read them? Do they act like clichs, empty signifiers that distance and protect us
from the event? Or, on the contrary, does their repetition in itself retraumatize, making
distant viewers into surrogate victims who, having seen the images so often, have adopted
them into their own narratives and memories, and have thus become all the more vulnerable
to their effects? If they cut and wound, do they enable memory, mourning, and working
through? Or is their repetition an effect of melancholic replay, appropriative identification?
(Surviving 5).
Barthes observes that the Photographrepresents the very subtle moment whenI am
neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience
a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter (14).
Floods suit was endorsed by the players union and advised by Arthur J. Goldbergformer
general counsel for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the United
Steelworkers of Americawho, in 1955, was a legal advisor on the merger of the American
Federation of Labor with the CIO.
Ever alert to fiction and fantasy, Red Smiths column closes with the quip, Thus the
commissioner restates baseballs labor policy: Run along, sonny, you bother me.
Fans recall that when Marichal made his MLB debut with the San Francisco Giants in 1960,
he joined Dominicans Felipe Alou and Matty Alou, Puerto Ricans Orlando Cepeda and Jos
Pagan, and Venezuelan Ramon Monzant. The third Alou brother, Jess Alou, joined the
Giants in 1963. Spanish was barred. The addition of global competitors to MLB rosters
decentered the prospects (and the reverie of authority) for US national ballplayers.
The Dodgers defeated the Giants for the National League pennant, and in October, went on
to beat the Minnesota Twins to win the 1965 World Series.
Smith even projects, in reverse, the footage of Trang Banghe plays it backward as if to
undo it, to move back in time to before the burning, and in so doing, make monstrous the
gaze in any instance.

So Close to Burning

301

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York:
Hill & Wang, 1981.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations. 1936.
Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
Berger, John. John Berger: Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. New York: Pantheon, 2001.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995.
Bonney, Jo. Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century.
New York: Theatre Communications, 2000.
Brunette, Peter, and David Wills, eds. The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.
Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1994. 932.
Burke, Ryan. Photo Coverage: Juan and John at the Public. BroadwayWorld. Wisdom Digital
Media, 7 Dec. 2009. Web. 10 Dec. 2009.
Carmichael, Stokely. Toward Black Liberation. The Massachusetts Review 7.4 (1966): 63951.
Debord, Guy. The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy. Trans. DonaldNicholson Smith and Ken Knabb. Situationist International Online, 1965. Web. 2 Feb. 2004.
Derrida, Jacques. Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme. Trans.
Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham UP, 2010.
. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Trans.
Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.
Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. New York: Free P, 1970.
Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern
Ireland. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
Flood, Curt. The Way It Is. With Richard Carter. New York: Trident, 1971.
Fusco, Coco, and Roger Guenveur Smith. Roger Guenveur Smith. Bomb 60 (1997): 6064.
Gagnier, Robert. Rodney King: A Postmortem Interview as Told by Obie Award Winner Roger
Guenveur Smith. The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 23 Oct. 2013. Web. 4 Nov. 2013.
Gerlach, Larry R. Crime and Punishment: The MarichalRoseboro Incident. NINE: A Journal of
Baseball History and Culture 12.2 (2004): 128.
Gray, Spalding. Swimming to Cambodia. New York: Theatre Communications, 1985.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New
York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century
America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Higgins, Dick. Intermedia. Something Else Newsletter 1.1 (1965): 16.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 10328.
. Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory. The Yale
Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 537.
Hoffarth, Tom. The Hope that Juan and John Isnt One and Done in L. A. by Roger Guenveur
Smith. Farther off the Wall with Tom Hoffarth. insidesocial.com, 28 May 2011. Web. 10
Jul. 2011.
Hughes, Holly, and David Romn. O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance. New York:
Grove, 1998.
Jones, Amelia. Presence in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation. Art Journal
56.4 (1997): 1118.
Juan and John. By and perf. Roger Guenveur Smith. Joseph Papp Public Theatre, New York. 120
Dec. 2009. Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles. 1719 May 2011. Performance.

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

302 L. D. Nielsen
Kalb, Jonathan. Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self. Theater 31.3
(2001): 1329.
Kuhn, Bowie. Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner. Ed. Asst. Martin Appel.
Lincoln, NE: Bison, 1997.
Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York:
Columbia UP, 1992.
Marichal, Juan. Juan Marichal: My Journey from the Dominican Republic to Cooperstown. With
Lew Freedman. Minneapolis, MN: MVP Books, 2011.
Martin, Carol. Bodies of Evidence. TDR: The Drama Review 50.3 (2006): 815.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1994.
. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2003.
. Magic of Objects. Callaloo 26.1 (2003): 10911.
Nielsen, Lara D. Introduction: Heterotopic Transformations: The (Il)liberal Neoliberal.
Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations. Ed. Lara D. Nielsen and
Patricia Ybarra. New York: Palgrave, 2012. 121.
. The Riddle of Labor and Performance. Forthcoming.
Oliver, Valerie Cassel, cur. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Grey Art
Gallery, New York University. 10 Sept. 20139 Mar. 2014. Exhibition.
Piper, Adrian. The Mythic Being; I/You (Her) (1974). Art in Our Time: 1950 to the Present.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. 5 Sep. 19992 Sep. 2001. Exhibition. Web. 21 Jul.
2012. <http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/the-mythic-being-i-slash-you-her>.
Pollock, Della, ed. Remembering: Oral History Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2005.
Portelli, Alessandro. What Makes Oral History Different. The Oral History Reader. 2nd ed. Ed.
Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson. New York: Routledge, 2006. 3242.
Reason, Matthew. Documentation, Disappearance and the Representation of Live Performance. New
York: Palgrave, 2006.
Reinelt, Janelle. The Promise of Documentary. Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present.
Ed. Alison Forsythe and Chris Megson. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 623.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1988.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: U of
North Carolina P, 1983.
Ronell, Avital. Interview. Angry Women. Ed. Andrea Juno and V. Vale. London: Re/Search, 1991.
12753.
Ruck, Rob. The Tropic of Baseball: Baseball in the Dominican Republic. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1998.
Sebald, W. G. On the Natural History of Destruction. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern
Library, 2004.
Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 2010.
Smith, Red. Curts 13th Amendment. New York Herald Tribune. 1 Jan. 1970. BaseballLibrary.com,
2006. Web. 7 Sep. 2010. <http://www.baseballlibrary.com/excerpts/excerpt.php?book=red_smith
&page=11>.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, 1977.
Spillers, Hortense J. Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse, or, Mrs. Stowe, Mr.
Reed. Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold
Rampersad. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 2561.

So Close to Burning

303

Downloaded by [Charles University in Prague] at 04:09 11 March 2015

Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Weiss, Peter. The Material and the Models: Notes towards a Definition of Documentary Theater.
Trans. Heinz Bernard. Theatre Quarterly 1.1 (1971): 4143.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
UP, 1992.
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. 2nd ed. London: British Film
Institute, 2008.
Young, Harvey. Embodying the Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body.
Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.