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[Intro]

[Bethany]: Thank you for joining us. There are four of us here in this conversation and we wanted to get started introducing ourselves.

[Saloni]: Hello everyone! My name is Saloni Mahajan; I am originally from New Delhi, India. I am getting my PhD in Performance Studies from University of Hawaii. My research kind of revolves around costumes and dress for performances, studying the aesthetic value as well as finding connections in the many different areas of research related to dress. I am super excited to be here.

[Anna]: Hey everyone, I’m Anna Johnson. Went to school in DC, and then spent much of my 20s living and working in Palestine before I started a PhD program at Notre Dame in Sociology and Peace Studies. My research focuses on the role of educational tourism in Palestine for people learning about the situation and getting involved in social movements. I’m excited to be here as well.

[Ben]: I’m Benjamin Hoover. I’m a PhD student at Indiana University in the English Department. My research works really on the medieval theater, medieval drama, and the kinds of blurry boundaries between genres that happen when the different writers kind of mesh up against each other.

[Bethany]: I’m Bethany Johnson. I’m in my fourth year; I’m writing my dissertation for the University of South Carolina. I’m getting my PhD in the history of STEM, particularly in medical history. My dissertation project is on the post-pandemic period in Philadelphia. What some folks call the Spanish Flu and I look closely at the 1919 to 1923 period. 

[Ben]: When we first started out it was kinda difficult to find any sort of real thread to pull these things together, as part of a noble endeavor, perhaps, to make something work. We found these kinds of throughlines of performance, of the importance of humanities and humanities research in collecting narratives and also talking about narratives in ethical ways in making sure that we’re responsible in how we talk about and discuss these stories.

[Bethany]: No matter what our research is, no matter how divergent it sounds on the surface, we all have a question about whose stories we can tell and how we should tell them.

[Anna]: In some ways it is like the beginning of a joke, when a historian, a medievalist, a designer, and sociologist walk into a room, what happens? And where do we end up? I think it was actually a really beautiful experience to try to do that with you all. 

[Saloni]: Yeah and I would echo the same thing in that it is such a beautiful experience to kind of start and that is the essence of humanities and the work that all of us do, is to actually do a performance in itself and start from this one topic and finding our own ways to use it in our own research, and having that thread kind of go across all of our research was such an amazing experience to witness. And all the stories that come in this podcast show us the way performance narratives, the body, and somewhere the theme of death have been just a constant theme, and something that we all had such amazing conversations about. Where our listeners would get different perspectives.

[Bethany]: If I could map a little of our episode today. What is going to follow this short opening conversation is that you’ll hear an intro from each of the scholars, and then you’ll get to hear us contending with these themes in a short piece of our own work. We'll come back at the end of the episode and get into a deeper conversation about what it was like to make these pieces and what we learned from each other.

[Saloni]: My research primarily focuses on costumes for performances. However, in the process of identifying a common thread within the diverse and amazing group, I unexpectedly encountered a verse from a sacred Hindu scripture. This verse not only offered me a new outlook on the inevitability of death, but also enabled me to establish connections between the spiritual concept and a facet of our daily existence. Remarkably, this revelation aligns seamlessly with the focus of my research. [music begins] Before anything, let me start by reciting the verse:

 वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय
नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि |
तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णा
न्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही || 22||
vāsānsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya
navāni gṛihṇāti naro ’parāṇi
tathā śharīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇānya
nyāni sanyāti navāni dehī

What I recited conveys the idea that "Just as a person sheds worn-out garments and wears new clothes, likewise, at the time of death, the soul casts off its worn-out body and enters a new one."
This verse is derived from Chapter Two, Verse 22 of the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred Hindu scripture originating from the latter part of the first millennium. The verse offers a symbolic perspective, linking the cyclical aspect of life and death to the everyday familiar practice of just changing clothes.
This is embedded within the dialogue between Lord Krishna and the warrior Arjuna in the epic Mahabharata, this teaching imparts the timeless wisdom that only the physical body is susceptible to destruction, while the soul endures eternally. But for someone engaged in the study of costume for performances, this verse, with its analogy of the body as interchangeable as garments, offers a unique lens through which to interpret the lesson.
Overall, the field of critical studies related to costume is a relatively new development, where scholars continually explore frameworks for examining dress, including all kinds of extraneous representations within performances and the diverse connections they establish. Despite ongoing efforts, many scholars emphasize the "absence of a significant canon of literature or establish methods for costume inquiry in history." In contrast, amidst various ancient Indian scriptures, numerous frameworks emerge.
In this particular verse, Bhagavad Gita provides a philosophical foundation, seamlessly intertwining the temporal nature of costumes or the body with the eternal essence of the soul. In doing so, it enhances my comprehension of the interconnectedness between the fleeting material world and the lasting spiritual realm. 
It also makes me wonder about the incredible way in which the scripture underscores the notion that just as the body is to a soul, extraneous representation is to a person —suggesting that, despite their interchangeability, both hold significance. Any dress or costume, similar to the body, plays an important role in shaping one's narrative and distinguishing oneself as a character in the grander scheme of existence. 
Alternatively, from a different viewpoint within the world of dramatic performances, the analogy of the body as interchangeable as garments reinforces the notion that actors embark on an ongoing journey of metamorphosis, transitioning from one character to the next. Comparable to the eternal soul, performers navigate a perpetual cycle of transformation from one dramatic presentation to another. 
These perspectives introduce a spiritual depth into the exploration of both costumes and performances, revealing the various ways in which they reflect the teachings found in the sacred verses of the Bhagavad Gita. What began just as an attempt to align with the podcast's theme on performance, body, and death has opened up a new realm for me to delve into, conduct further research, explore, and study, ultimately contributing to filling gaps in the existing research.
[Anna]: The following comes from my notes after a research visit with a university professor in the city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Already by the time this was written in May of 2023, dozens of Palestinians had been killed in this area of Palestine. 
It’s been less than 24 hours since I was with Sa’ed and I already find my mind distanced from the experience of being with him in Nablus. I could tell in some ways that I was already dissociating when I was with him and he was reciting poetry to me and telling me about his mother’s assassination during the first intifada and showing me videos of himself talking about the city of Nablus as well as a video of a British woman reading a poem that he wrote  and she found for a Palestine demonstration — she starts to cry at the end and I smiled, because it was sweet, realizing as I did so that this was not the expected reaction. Sa’ed said “I cry every time she starts to cry.” The barrage of deeply personal stories or poetry was overwhelming but my reaction was to create a certain distance between what I was hearing and my feeling world. I think this was facilitated by his interspersing of videos of himself telling the same information he was telling me in person. I did not, for instance, ask him to tell me what happened to his mother because I knew he had done so in video and I could watch it rather than have him relive it. But I think it enabled me to embody a certain kind of spectator - listening for information to follow-up on as a researcher, but not for the emotive and embodied feelings hearing such stories might evoke.
 
I had visited Sa’ed on the university campus, and after chatting for a while, he told me he would take me to his mother’s grave after his afternoon class. I had been planning to leave Nablus early to ensure I could make it all the way back to Bethlehem, but he insisted that this was important and that I would still be able to get home. 
 
I attended his afternoon class and then we left the university and began walking down the narrow sidewalks of one of Nablus’ main roads. As we walked Sa’ed frequently remarked on the trash strewn along the route despite his myriad efforts to organize clean-ups in the city. After 20 minutes, we arrived at the gates of the cemetery stretching across a hill east of the old city.
 
The cemetery was a peaceful respite from the bustling city street. As we walked in, I could see mourners scattered at gravesides down the main path – but we veered off to the side and walked up a hill to a grave that lay separated from the others around it. The tombstone was elevated on a concrete platform with benches on three sides and the whole platform was covered by a simple metal roof. This was his mother’s grave. Sa’ed was displeased by the accumulation of debris and retrieved a broom from the top of the roof to sweep the area clean.
 
After a few minutes we continued down a path towards the fresh graves – of which there were many. Set with red, green and black type these graves were surrounded by Palestinian flags, flowers, and other mementos remembering the recently assassinated martyrs. A few young men and women were crouched beside several of the graves. Two very young boys – perhaps 7 or 8 – were hanging around and Sa’ed spoke to them – asking who they were and who they were there for. Their brother was one of the martyrs and Sa’ed insisted that we walk through the cemetery to his grave as well with the two boys. The whole experience was surreal – Sa’ed was speaking loudly to me in English about the martyrs and I just kept repeating “allah yerhamo” or “allah yerhamhum” – may God have mercy on them – at each grave and for each story. What else was there to say? “Haram….shame” It all felt so empty. Several times he stopped to recite the fatiha for people. By many of the graves he denoted as “the son of my friend.” He pointed out the section of the cemetery where faded tombstones marked the graves of martyrs from the first and second intifadas.
 
He told me he starts every tour of Nablus in the cemetery because he wants people to understand the “end result” of occupation. This is where it’s headed. This is where it leads. He wants people to stand amidst the actual graves and contemplate the brutality of the occupation.
 
By the time we left the cemetery, I almost felt as if I had left my body as well. I had no more questions, no meaningful commentary or even words of solace. The experience drives home for me how important local context is for defining what people will want visitors to know about their city and about their lives. And in a year like this, it makes sense that the cemetery would be the place to start in Nablus. Although it’s not the place to end. We ended in a sweet shop down the road for a Nablus delicacy and strong sips of Arabic coffee. 
 
I am left haunted by this experience, by the memory of his mother – may God protect her – and of the many martyrs whose graves we passed – may God grant them peace – and by the professor who lifted his shirt in the middle of a street in downtown Nablus to reveal the scars on his abdomen left by multiple bullet wounds. And by my own questions – what is my responsibility? Did I need to “see” this to believe it – to understand the depth of the catastrophe and the visceral reality of the grief. How does seeing it change me, and what further responsibility does it leave me with? How will I carry and honor the weight of these experiences and the weight of witnessing this year of violence without flattening the story?
[Ben]: Few images express the calamities of fourteenth-century England better than the metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune (not to be confused with the modern game show). [medieval tavern music starts] Popularized as a way to depict the inconstant nature of the world, the personified figure of Fortune holds the span of society aboard her wheel, turning it at random, elevating the low and deposing those on high. Following a century of such repeated calamities as: continual war with France, the catastrophe of bubonic plague, the political upheavals of popular revolt, and the deposition of the king, it is fitting that subsequent writers might be wracked with the anxiety of their worlds falling apart. 
In searching for any semblance of stability, meditation on one constant of the human experience —dying— somewhat grotesquely proved generative for the poets and dramatists of fifteenth-century England.  For instance, in the poetic and artistic tradition of the Dance of Death, Death is depicted as weaving between the social hierarchy, commanding all to join his procession to the grave. Within this sweep of dialogue and movement, the various individuals to whom Death speaks, whether they be kings, bishops, merchants, or beggars are all corralled to the same inevitable fate. And though Death is non-negotiating and somewhat impassive to the pleas of the other dancers, his attitude can be sympathetic to those who suffered in life; I want to linger in particular on the figure of the laborer within fifteenth-century writer John Lydgate’s version of the poem, to whom Death says: 

You laborer, who in sorrow and pain
Have led your life in so great travail,
You must also join my dance but do not disdain,
For it won’t help you if you do.
And the reason I come to you now 
Is only for this: to bring you
From this false world that so often fails people.
It is foolish to want to live forever.

The Laborer gets a word in, responding to Death: 

I have wished so many times for Death,
Although I would rather now flee from him —
I would rather put myself in the discomfort
Of the wind and rain and pushing of the plow,
And toil for my reward with spade or pick,
Delving and digging, pushing my cart.
But I say plainly now that in this world there is no rest.

Death marks the reader or the viewer’s understanding of the laborer with a note of sympathy; we are presented with an image of labor’s toil, especially as it extends to the pain of the body. But in thinking about narrative agency, listening to the laborer provides a moment that voices this pain, while also expressing the importance of his work to himself. This small moment within a much longer poem, displays a valuing of what the labor does and, in spite of the pain, the Laborer ascribes greater meaning to work that is so often neglected and forgotten. This complicated coexistence of pain and value reminds readers and scholars that people and their stories contain multitudes and part of what humanist scholars might need to do as attendants to these stories is to not limit how people speak for themselves.

[Bethany]: I’ve long been interested in epidemics. Early twentieth-century influenza, sometimes called the Spanish Flu, which traveled the world from 1918 to 1920 is no exception, particularly because for decades, historians referred to the pandemic as lost or forgotten. In the last five years, scholars have come to more complex conclusions in what follows. I explore two post pandemic narratives where nearly 18,000 people died in under six weeks. 

[Sound fades in at the background, plates clinking, light music] It’s December 6, 1918, and the ballroom of the Bellevue-Stratford, a lavish hotel in Philadelphia, holds over 300 people. Celebrating over a catered lunch, attendees in their finest clothing and hats surround tables set with linen and crystal. Some women wear crisp military uniforms. The room is so packed that the waitstaff squeezes sideways between the tables, trays held aloft. Patriotic bunting hangs from the mezzanine, and in the right-hand corner of the picture, a banner shows the name and logo of the Emergency Aid Aides, a group of women volunteers who worked on the home front throughout the Great War. Some of the city's most distinguished citizens are seated on a platform at the front of the room, including Mayor Smith and well-regarded society matrons. The image, published in the Evening Public Ledger, shows a city returning to normal after a crisis. The article records speakers praising the Emergency Aid's efforts during the influenza emergency in October. Twelve gold medals are awarded to young Emergency Aid workers who unflaggingly risked their lives caring for the ill in homes or hospitals and running the Motor Corps that transported nurses, doctors, and patients. The narrative is one of triumph in the face of death. [Fade out sound]

On January 03, 1919, a concerned Philadelphian, “W.H.,” describes the physical fallout of the epidemic at streetcar stops.  [Sound of streetcar fades in] They state: “The influenza has left hundreds of persons with weak hearts, and I see some of them daily dragging themselves up the stairs, panting and ready to fall over on account of the exertion. I daily expect to hear that some folks have dropped over dead.” [Sounds fade out]. This op-ed offers an alternative narrative in which city inhabitants' lives and health are altered, and surviving is not the end of the story.

Indeed, in the week following the Bellevue Stratford meeting, death records reveal a “mini-wave” of influenza driving up new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths through January, when W.H. commented on the health of the local populace. In fact, twenty-five people died of influenza died on the day of the Emergency Aid gold medal ceremony.

Given the scarcity of influenza discussion and the in-depth coverage of the armistice and peace negotiations in newspapers in 1919 and 1920, one could conclude that Philadelphians left influenza behind to focus on demilitarization after the Great War. Another interpretation, however, is that inhabitants followed the outcome of the War alongside the low thrum of existential dread common in a time when epidemic diseases took many lives each year.
 
This is not something that would have occurred to me prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. I’ve read about the horrors of the pandemic and wondered how communities failed, refused, or forgot to slow down and memorize the catastrophe they weathered. Scholars have argued that the flu was overshadowed by the armistice, the horror was so enormous people couldn’t face it, and that the epidemic disappeared with the same speed at which it arrived. That isn’t what I’m finding. During COVID, the waves seemed to overlap, creating the impression of a constant stream of cases punctuated by tidal waves representing new strains like Delta or Omicron. Living through a global pandemic showed me that it’s hard to pick a time to commemorate something that feels as if it never ends.
 
Now, when I read about Emergency Aid’s celebratory banquet and just over a month later, I find an op-ed and other articles in the Philadelphia press describing post-influenza health impacts, economic hardship, and new cases, it is clearer to me that Philadelphians did commemorate their communal struggle to survive influenza, even as the disease continued to infect their neighbors.

As a historian studying these documents, one of my tasks is to weave divergent narratives into a cohesive whole. As we know, the outcomes of a crisis are neither few nor simple. To offer a nuanced picture of post-influenza Philadelphia, I explore narratives of triumph and accomplishment alongside suffering and loss. Collecting divergent narratives allows me to recount the experiences of a broader range of people, giving me a chance to understand and explain the world they inhabited.

[Anna]: Our listener might be wondering what do these have to do with each other? We’ve really taken you to different places, different points in time, and we see a lot of connections.

[Ben]: I think that one of the things that really came out of your story, Anna, is the pausing on every one of the graves and honoring every one of the graves. And I think that in some ways, the work that almost metaphorically is the work of the humanities scholar is to work out moments of pause and to really kind of use those moments of pausing as a way of memorializing events, tragedies, happenings, doom, calamity, whatever word you might want to attribute to that. In a way that forces us not to forget what happened. And so, I think within that, we’ve seen also the ways in which even in these these stories of great tragedy that there is this kind of optimism that comes out of it, by thinking through how these things can build community in some really, I think, really revealing, revealing, ways.

[Solani]: And also the overall thing that we all started with the act of what is a performance? Narratives have this one thing in common with, you know, it is not just a dramatic or, you know, we think of theater and films and entertainment performance, but how the performance of everyday life or something like changing your garments can connect to something which is you know, something to do with the life cycle. But at the same time  what you see performance to be when somebody is narrating the story which is so close to their heart and how somebody perceives that and how the listener perceives that; everything, all of that is a performance from when a person comes and opens up their shirt and there on gun wounds on it, so there’s the performance of coming out and showing that. But also what has happened behind it, every single thing that we do, from sitting in a hotel room and having to discuss these situations, or even anything that happened throughout the pandemic, during the time that Bethany, you’re mentioning, or even, you know, the connections you made with COVID. A lot of things happened, maybe all of us and all the listeners had their own experiences through that pandemic and created their own everyday life that was a performance, and how the after-effects of that, or even going back to like the medieval literature said, you know, kind of made those connections. It is about theater, it comes back to those stories, it comes back to those narratives, it comes back to the performance. And it is so amazing to see how the word itself, performance itself, holes all of this and so much more that we don’t even have time and maybe, and that comes up in all the following episodes of this, of just unwinding what themes around it, that it, it’s just so amazing to see that connect of just performance narrative. And when we pick up one specific theme or facet of it, everybody has something different to tell. 

[Bethany]: Obviously, right now, I’m kind of stuck on doom. I really like that piece, that facet that has come out of it. For me, what we’re doing as scholars here and what happened for me as a listener, Saloni in one sense, it could be really bleak that the life cycle is as easy as changing clothes, or it could be joyous that it is as joyous as changing a costume. It is as fluid as changing a costume. So with each of your stories, I felt like I went so far into what could be perceived as darkness, that I felt less alone at the end of it. So Ben, when you’re talking about these literary works, you know, and you think about this is the Black Death period, this is like when its really showing up for people and there’s something really dark and lonely about that, but death will come for all of us and we are not alone in that. Of course, the social conditions are different, and I think you made a good point about death stopping to speak to the worker, but also the king, right? And in Anna’s piece, gosh, the the potential heaviness of going on a tourist tour of a cemetery—that has a real doomscape feel to it, and yet, in that story, he stops and he communes with each family at each grave. A professor shows a piece of his body to say the only way out of this is together. No, what we need to hear right now and what the humanities can offer us is that we are not alone.

[Anna]: I really love, love that; I was really struck by a couple of things. One, Saloni, you talked about the interconnectedness of the material and the spiritual, and I think that there’s ways that each of us are kind of grappling with whether it’s a spiritual element or our our narratives and the material consequences of choices that are made about words that are used. You know, in my case, thinking a lot about who is labeled as a terrorist and why and you know, how these kinds of labels have such consequences, the performance aspect of what the body is doing in death also. And Ben talked about the art of dying and that’s a phrase that I think is, is sticking with me. It resonates so much. I want to think more deeply about, in my context, the art of dying, but also the art of grieving. What the people who are left do with that to honor those, those legacies. Bethany you’ve exactly touched on what Sa’ed was taking me to the cemetery to, to honor life and to advocate for life to say that this needs to end. These conditions of death need to end. And, and there’s there is a hope in that. I’m so glad that you made these connections between influenza and COVID. That really brought it home for me because there’s also this question, who is going to tell the COVID story? And I’ve been thinking about that just as a person who’s experienced this, wondering when do we memorialize? We don’t. And what does that mean about how we honor this era that we’ve all lived through.

[Bethany]: By telling the story of influenza. We are marking unmarked graves, we are doing what Ben said we are, commemorating with our work; we are the memorializers then. 

[Saloni]: That also takes me back to the question that Anna asked us. Like it’s the responsibility of telling the stories of like you said, memorializing it. You know, many of us and many of the listeners are also like with, with what’s happening in the world right now, kind of questioning what their responsibility is, and what they’re seeing on social media and, and everything around us. And there’s so much happening. The question keeps coming back like, what can I do? What is my responsibility? How can I add to it? And you know, as scholars, we do it in our own ways. As, as researchers, we do it in our own ways. How does it change me? What’s the further responsibility? You know, we’ve written about this, and I’m glad that we’re having this conversation and it is such an amazing and safe space to have this conversation and understand each other’s perspectives, making that a little bit of change. And, you know, and having that, just putting a thought in, even if in, one listener’s minds, if there’s a thought of, ah the impact of death, you know, even, even that it’s amazing how listening to, you know, all three of yours, I had goosebumps. I was like in a way again. I mean it, it might go a little more personally, but I, I am grieving right now and and it is of my father. So that is one of the things where I think Anna’s narrative hit. I know it’s nowhere close to it, but at the same time, these stories of send it out to the world, of of putting ourselves in that place, putting ourselves in that situation and rethinking how much, how should we react and how we should advocate make ourselves heard, but even have a, have a perspective, have a voice.

[Anna]: I think that’s so beautiful Saloni, and it reminds me, in hearing the themes that were coming out for you all, that you know, Saloni, you mentioned kind of the performances happening in the story that I’m telling. And in one of those performances, probably the one I’m most aware of is my own. What does it mean to walk through the cemetery and to have, feel like such small utterances. It feels so insufficient because it’s hard to hold all of these things. And I think we also really see that and face that in the present moment. One of the things we can do and Ben’s work shows us that as humans, we’ve been doing this for a long time, is to think together through poems, through music, through these ways that we  kind of lift up our souls.

[Outro]
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