Neue Wirklichkeiten, neue Formen? Das Gerichtstheater der globalen Moderne am Beispiel von Milo Raus "Das Kongo Tribunal" (2017)

Abstract

The study of courtroom scenes in literary and cultural studies – primarily situated within the research field of ‘Law and Literature’ – has recently undergone a shift towards a global perspective, which expands the established motif of courtroom drama both structurally and functionally. Using Milo Rau’s Das Kongo Tribunal (2017) as an example, this article examines how this expansion takes place by applying performative and symbolic legal practices – role attribution, procedural architecture, the act of passing judgement – to a conflict for which there is no competent authority under the rule of law. Drawing on models from performance and institutional theory, the tribunal is characterised as a hybrid institutionalisation, whose binding – albeit not legally binding – form of recognition ties in with the pluralism of possibilities inherent in New Realism. However, this finding is problematised in that the subversive potential thus unleashed cannot be assessed in isolation from its structural conditions: in the procedural leadership of a European director, as well as in the division of labour between the emotionalised testimony of the Global South and the dispassionate expertise of the Global North, the very neo-colonial asymmetry that is being called into question is formally reproduced.