ABSTRACT

The terror attack carried out at two mosques in Aotearoa New Zealand by a white supremacist in 2019 was intended as a spectacle for mass public consumption. Its live-stream on Facebook invited hyper-identification (akin to a first-person shooter game), exploiting the disembodied nature of digital connection. In this essay, I draw from Judith Butler’s concept of ‘hallucinatory merging’ to characterize this performativity and to suggest that both the killings and their filming were an attack on the ‘generativity’ of the assembly of bodies-in-prayer. The public response led by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern avowedly rejected the ideology of white supremacy that motivated the attack. Her remark that ‘this is not us’ galvanized public sentiment, generating waves of public solidarity and a variety of public counter-performances. At the same time, this was a white supremacist act carried out in a settler (post-colonial) society, throwing into sharp relief the everyday performances of racial intolerance that trouble the notion that this is ‘not us,’ a point made by various communities including Indigenous Māori. In tracing the two opposed modes of performance – that of white supremacist exclusivity and a national narrative of inclusion – I reflect on their entanglement as well as their distinction.

摘要

一名白人至上主义者于 2019 年在新西兰 Aotearoa 的两座清真寺发动了恐怖袭击，目的是为大众消费提供一个奇观。它在 Facebook 上的直播邀请了超级身份识别（类似于第一人称射击游戏），利用数字连接的无形特性。在这篇文章中，我借鉴了朱迪思·巴特勒的“幻觉合并”概念来描述这种表演性，并暗示杀戮和他们的拍摄都是对祈祷中的身体组合的“生成性”的攻击。由新西兰总理杰辛达·阿德恩 (Jacinda Ardern) 领导的公众回应公开反对引发袭击的白人至上意识形态。她的“这不是我们”的言论激起了公众的情绪，引发了公众的声援浪潮和各种公开的反表演。与此同时，这是在定居者（后殖民）社会中进行的白人至上主义行为，使种族不容忍的日常表现变得尖锐起来，这些表现困扰着“这不是我们”的观念，这一点由不同的人提出。包括土著毛利人在内的社区。在追踪两种对立的表现模式——白人至上主义排他性和民族包容性叙事——时，我反思了它们的纠缠和区别。