The Line: committing and commemorating ‘the crime without a name’

Abstract

This article analyses Gina Shmukler’s verbatim play The Line (2012) and argues for another look at the testimonies captured from witnesses, survivors and perpetrators of the violence targeting foreign and perceived as foreign persons in South Africa that escalated in 2008 and in 2015. It is a narrative analysis of the play that uses Gregory H. Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide model and the United Nations Convention on Genocide to investigate the theatrical representation of the violence. This account argues that the events that are captured in the play and that inspired it should be reconsidered as acts of genocide. In the absence of an official acknowledgement of the events as genocide, performances like The Line and other ‘xenophobia’ plays entomb what Winston Churchill called ‘a crime without a name’ (1965). The article argues that performance stands as the public yet ephemeral and embodied commemoration of the trauma of genocide violence, filling the void of the absent murals and museums that are often a built-in commemoration of past and contemporary trauma.