Performative figures and political affordances Towards a critical history of the clown in Western media and performances

This research examines the affordances of clown figures across Western media, offering critical perspectives on the history of clowning by exploring its colonial legacies and oppressive performativity. The study departs from the observation that in the 1960s, the ‘New Clowns’ practitioners have essentialised clown history as a cultural continuum and the clown as a universal symbol for political subversion. This historiographic (mis)conception emerges within a specific context of revolutionary and post-fascist discourses that have shaped the artistic legitimation of clown practices and their education theories. I demonstrate that these essentialist discourses have contributed to the dismissal of oppressive dramaturgies present in early 20th-century circus performances, which construct the Black Auguste as Other through colonial humour and racist stereotypes. These dramaturgies reflect broader exhibitory practices of the time -such as human zoos, hysterics’ balls and freak shows- that reinforce systems of social domination by shaping collective imaginaries. To reflect these practices in the history of clowning, I offer the concept of a ‘performative figure’, that is a figure enacting social schemes of oppression through the interplay between collective representations and embodied performances. Within this renewed framework, the study explores the tension between the performance of the body, constructed as failing and laughable, and the narration of an ‘authentic’ interiority in clown education theories and fiction. As argued, this tension creates an ambivalence in the political affordance of the clown, whose subversion of societal rules and authority might serve as both a tool for social justice and the perpetuation of systemic violence. By reflecting on the history of the clown’s affordances and their political malleability, the research opens up on how a performative figure can reflect social and political changes, and how their affordances are obscured or activated over time, at odds with an evolutionary conception of cultural history.