James Harding, “Staging Sedition: Towards a Theory of Guerrilla Equivocation” (Germany and Serbia)

Image of a sculpture of a head.

I requested travel and accommodation funding for research that I conducted and for lectures that I gave in Europe during the summer of 2018. Specifically, I requested funding for a trip to Europe from June 15th to July 15th, 2018. The time frame for my request was largely the product of the scheduled dates for my lectures, which included an invited lecture at the Freie Universität, Berlin on June 19th followed by a presented paper at the IFTR Conference in Belgrade during the week of July 9th.  But I also wanted to take advantage of the time between the two lectures to do archival research in the Dada collections held at the Berlinische Galerie. Those collections include the “Raoul Hausmann Archiv,” which is part of the Berlinische Galerie’s general holdings on the avant-gardist Hannah Höch. The Hausmann Archiv contains material directly pertinent to – and providing context for – the events that the Berlin Dadaists orchestrated on April 1, 1919 when much to the astonishment of the local authorities, Hausmann and his fellow Dadaist Johannes Baader declared a“Dada Republic” in a suburb of Berlin – a declaration taken seriously enough that authorities mobilized the local militia.  I addressed this rather infamous April fool’s day hoax in both of my lectures, and the lectures themselves provided the basis for a chapter in the new book that I am now completing. That chapter examines the performative foundations of calculated hoaxes that masquerade as acts of sedition, and it is the fourth of five planned chapters of a book tentatively titled Performance Beyond the Pale: Radical Acts and Bodies in Extremis. Support from IPCCR thus enabled me to attend the IFTR conference, give the invited lecture in Berlin, and complete the forth chapter in my current book project.