Playing Dead in Cuba: Coco Fusco’s Stagings of Dissensus1

This article examines how the Cuban-American artist and writer Coco Fusco reframes Cuban exile politics through her negation of the policing of movement within and across the island nationʹs borders. Fuscoʹs rejection of the nationalist politics that have traditionally limited the discourse of the Cuban exile community enables her to explore previously disarticulated dimensions of the exile experience. Drawing on Jacques Ranciereʹs notion of dissensus as the performance of a wrong, I discuss Fuscoʹs stagings of the exclusions of exile in two clandestine performances, executed in Havana in 1997 and 2000, in which she examines the exileʹs impossible desire for repatriation. Employing an uncanny blurring of fantasy and reality in her re-enactment of a wake and staging of a burial, Fusco, in her site-specific performances, offers new possibilities for imagining Cuban identity and exilic mobility in the neoliberal era.