Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 73

Does Western Performance
Give Voice?
Asif Majid
Asif Majid was born outside Baltimore, MD. His mother grew up in Tanzania on the shores of
Lake Victoria, and later became an avid gardener and public health expert. His father grew up in
northern Pakistan as a poetry enthusiast and budding engineer. As an infant, Asif enjoyed playing
pots and pans at his mother’s feet, resulting in a lifelong passion for performance that has led him
to mosques, schools, churches, cafés, festivals, treetops, concert halls, and community centers. He
graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and valedictorian from the University of Maryland,
Baltimore County, where he designed his own major focusing on peace and conflict. Asif then earned
an MA with distinction in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University, during which time he
devised and assistant directed Generation (Wh)Y: Global Voices on Stage at The Lab. Currently, he
is pursuing a practice-based PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance at The University of
Manchester, for which he is doing an ethnography of devising theater with British Muslim youth. As
an educator, Asif has engaged thousands of young people in the United States and abroad through
summer programs, Model UN activities, and work at Arena Stage, Seeds of Peace, and Johns
Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth, using online and theatrical simulations to develop
their understandings of racism, identity, and conflict.
In the West, the notion of “giving voice” is a recurring theme found at the
intersection of performance and politics. Yet, there are seldom interrogations
of how practitioners and scholars use and understand the term. To give voice
is taken as a positive practice, a goal to which everyone should strive. But, I
am skeptical of this unfettered enthusiasm. This is because it is based on a
problematic assumption: that socially engaged Western performance gives
voice to those that previously did not possess it.
In the West, socially engaged performances that
privilege narratives outside the mainstream
are often conceptualized as giving voice to the
voiceless. Voice is framed as something that
individuals from the Global South, communities
of color, refugees, women, and the “Other” do
not have. Were this true, it would render these
individuals “subaltern,” per postcolonial critical
theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (����) idea
that the subaltern cannot speak. To be subaltern
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