Raz Weiner
A Nation Among Nations of Nature: Zionist Blackface in Kibbutz Educational Performances
The practice of educational performances in elementary school education in kibbutzim, known as Yom Africa (Africa Day; 19050s-1990s) featured mimetic impressions of Africans by kibbutz children. Disguised as pedagogical children play, Africa Day evoked settler imagined indigeneity while denying indigenous presence and existence. It created a ‘surface’ to which race, ethnicity, settler-subjectivity, and indigeneity stick and so leak into one another. When considered vis-á-vis discourses of antisemitic racialisation and the attempt of Zionist Socialism to revise them, Africa Day emerges as a complex rendition of ‘ethnic drag’ and a site of simultaneous reiteration and renegotiation of race and racism endemic to settler-colonialism.
Maker and researcher of performance and politics, Raz Weiner studies intersections of body, archive, and space in settler-colonialism. His work as a drag performer, director, writer, and dramaturg features globally. He received his PhD from the Royal Holloway University of London, where his project explored the epistemologies of drag performance both as a phenomenological metaphor and as a research methodology of landscape and architecture.