The Object as Insurgent Subject: The Case for a Critical Puppetry

What can puppetry, a process by which objects are humanised, teach us about racialization, a process by which humans are objectified? As an embodied practice, puppetry disrupts binary distinctions between object and subject, inanimate and animate, and nonhuman and human matter. As a result, it offers the possibility to productively destabilise the dominant ontologies and biopolitical constructions which underpin the subjugation of racialized bodies (Chen 2001; Weheliye 2014). Conversely, because its aesthetic vocabularies are rooted in exaggeration, and because it uses objects to represent humans, puppetry simultaneously offers unique possibilities for the reproduction and reinscription of racial stereotypes and hegemonic racial ideologies. I suggest that puppetry offers artists a uniquely powerful and dangerous location from which to speak about identity, and that a critical appraisal of these possibilities and dangers is long overdue. Drawing on Black feminist theories of the human (Wynter 2003; Weheliye 2014) and critical work on the materiality of race (Chen 2001; Jackson 2020), this paper will make a case for an approach I term critical puppetry. Critical puppetry provides a critical and theoretical framework with which to analyze both object and human-based representations of identity in performance, and explores how puppetry might function, intentionally or otherwise, to reinforce logics of dehumanisation and objectification. Conversely, critical puppetry asks what work puppetry might do to resist the coercive frameworks that haunt both puppetry and racialization, and to forward a more inclusive sense of the human than that which has been naturalized in the contemporary Western world.