1. Muñoz, José Esteban, “Teaching, Minoritarian Knowledge, and Love,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 14.2 (2005): 117–21Google Scholar, at 120.

2. This essay continues the conversation begun in my first book, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013)Google Scholar, but is part of a new study of the Marxist lessons of minoritarian performance. This version of the argument focuses largely on the question of law and the theorization of inoperativity in the work of Giorgio Agamben. In the larger project my turn to the theory of inoperativity is more heavily informed by Jean-Luc Nancy's exploration of inoperativity as that which makes possible the realization of communistic sociality: Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community. Ed. Connor, Peter. Trans. Connor, Peter, Garbus, Lis, Holland, Michael, and Sawhney, Simona. (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

3. Michi Barall is a playwright, a scholar, and an actor. As a performer, she is largely associated with new works by U.S. authors who are central to New York's theatre world, especially the downtown theatre scene. Before Rescue Me, Barall performed with the Ma-Yi company's productions of Sung Rno's wAve (2004) and American Hwangap (2009). She has also been associated with avant-garde playwrights such as Charles Mee, Naomi Iizuka, and Anna Deavere Smith.

4. “About Ma-Yi Theater Company,” Ma-Yi Theater Company Web site, http://ma-yitheatre.org/about/ (accessed 2 July 2013).

5. Shimakawa, Karen, “Ghost Families in Sung Rno's Cleveland Raining,” Theatre Journal 52.3 (2000): 381–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 381.

6. Michi Barall, “Rescue Me,” 60, unpublished manuscript, 2010, in author's possession. (Subsequent citations by MS page number are given parenthetically in the text.)

7. In invoking the “ground level,” I gesture to a tradition of Marxist cultural theory that theorizes minoritarian practices that occur within the base, quite literally at the “ground level.” See, for example, Muñoz, José Esteban, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 102.

8. Agamben, Giorgio, Nudities, trans. Kishik, David and Pedatella, Stefan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, 102.

9. Ibid.

10. Barall's adaptation is largely concerned with emancipation, the performative event by which one is made or becomes free. This article relies primarily on a definition of freedom that is negative (freedom from) as opposed to one that is positive (freedom to or freedom in). In theorizing the concept of emancipation broadly, I mean to demonstrate the importance of the term to a range of populations and historical/political contexts but in no way mean to detract from the specific valences of the term that are uniquely relevant to the question of freedom and blackness in the postslavery United States.

11. Affirming a congressional finding that “significant progress [has been made] in eliminating” some structural forms of racial discrimination, the U.S. Supreme Court increasingly relies upon the color-blind logic that the United States is postrace: Shelby v. Holder, 570 U.S., no. 12–96, Ginsburg, J., dissenting slip opinion, at 7 (2013), www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-96_6k47.pdf (accessed 2 July 2013).

12. See Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, 551 U.S. 701, 748 (2007).

13. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Bynner, Witter, in Euripides II, ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 117–87Google Scholar, at 137; cf. Barall, 3.

14. Agamben, Giorgio, Profanations, trans. Fort, Jeff (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 86Google Scholar.

15. Ibid.

16. The process, which was first mapped out in the Law of the Twelve Tables, is further illuminated by Ulpian, who writes, “Descendants are freed from the authority of ascendants by ‘emancipation’ [emancipatione], that is, if after they have been ‘mancipati,’ ‘transferred as property,’ they have been manumitted [manumissi]”; Remains of Old Latin, vol. 3: Lucilius, “The Twelve Tables,” trans. Warmington, E. H. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 440–2Google Scholar. See also “emancipate, v.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 9 August 2013. The Law of the Twelve Tables is the ancient foundation of Roman law.

17. Richmond Lattimore, “Introduction to Iphigenia in Tauris,” in Euripides II, 118–00, at 118; Walker, Charles R., “Introduction to Iphigenia in Aulis,” in Euripides IV, ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 290–00Google Scholar, at 210.

18. Aeschylus, Aeschylus I: Oresteia—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richmond, trans. Lattimore, Richard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar, 1.

19. Ibid., 86, 130–1.

20. Ibid., 153, 63, 64.

21. Ibid., 163.

22. On Aeschylus' trial, see Bertoch, Marvin J., “The Greeks Had a Jury for It,” American Bar Association Journal 57.10 (1971): 1012–14Google Scholar, at 1013.

23. Ibid., 1012. See also Lewis, John David, “Solon of Athens and the Ethics of Good Business,” Journal of Business Ethics 89.1 (2009): 123–38Google Scholar, at 131–32.

24. Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, in The Athenian Constitution, The Eudemian Ethics, On Virtue and Vices, trans. Rackham, H. (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1952), 1–188Google Scholar, at 33.

25. Menke, Christoph, “Law and Violence,” Law and Literature 22.1 (2010): 1–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 3–4.

26. Loraux, Nicole, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens, trans. Pache, Corinne with Fort, Jeff (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 41Google Scholar.

27. In this sense, the erinyes/eumenides function as symbols of the “foundational violence” that Walter Benjamin and later Jacques Derrida understood as the force behind all forms of legal authority. See Benjamin, Walter, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Demetz, Peter, trans. Jephcott, Edmund (New York: Schocken, 1978), 277–300Google Scholar; and Derrida, Jacques, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Quaintance, Mary, Cardozo Law Review 11.5–6 (1989–90): 920–1045Google Scholar.

28. Agamben, Giorgio, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Dailey, Patricia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 95Google Scholar.

29. As Richmond Lattimore argues, Euripides was “sobered by the horrors of internecine war [between Athens and Sparta], and has dropped the narrow, often bellicose pro-Athenian theme [of his earlier works] in favor of a wider Hellenism”; Lattimore, 119.

30. Ibid., 124.

31. Herodotus, The Histories, 2d rev. ed., trans. de Sélincourt, Aubrey (New York: Penguin, 2003), 275Google Scholar.

32. Classics scholars have engaged in vigorous debate about whether or not Euripides' narrative sought, in the words of Maurice Platnauer, “to clear the Greeks by attributing such sacrifice to the barbarians”: Maurice Platnauer, “Commentary” (in English) in Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (in Greek), ed. Platnauer (1936; 1st reprint ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 000–00Google Scholar, at 178. For a summary of such debates, see Hughes, Dennis D., Human Sacrifice in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1991), 81, 89–90.Google Scholar

33. Hadas, Moses, introductory note to Iphigenia among the Taurians, in Euripides: Ten Plays (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981), 241Google Scholar.

34. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (Bynner), 172.

35. Agamben, Giorgio, “The Glorious Body,” in Nudities, trans. Kishik, David and Pedatella, Stefan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 91–103Google Scholar, at 96.

36. Ibid., 102. Agamben curiously suggests that this operation is “more human.” While this may be the case (though I am not fully convinced), humanity is not the focus of our analysis, and so I have here excised that part of the quote.

37. Ibid., 103.

38. Ma-Yi Theater Company, Rescue Me: A Postmodern Classic with Snacks (New York: Ohio Theatre, 2010)Google Scholar (production program).

39. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Markmann, Charles Lam (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 112.Google Scholar

40. Kee, Joan, “Visual Reconnaissance,” in Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, ed. Nguyen, Mimi Thi and Tu, Thuy Linh Nguyen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 130–49Google Scholar, at 136.

41. Rey Chow describes such performances as acts of “coercive mimeticism”; Chow, Rey, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 95–127Google Scholar.

42. Aristotle discusses the scene in the Poetics; Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Heath, Malcolm (New York: Penguin, 1996), 19Google Scholar.

43. For a further discussion of color-blind casting strategies and their relationship to liberal forms of judicial review, see Chambers-Letson, 8–9, 72–5.

44. Pao, Angela C., “Changing Faces: Recasting National Identity in All-Asian(-)American Dramas,” Theatre Journal 53.3 (2001): 389–409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 408.

45. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (Bynner), 185.

46. Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 155Google Scholar.

47. Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris (Bynner), 185–6.

48. Austin, 109.