The Total Work of War: William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load as Post-Colonial Gesamtkunstwerk

William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load (2018) was created to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Africans who lost their lives as porters during World War I. Assembling a range of visual and sonic signifiers of what Hubert van den Berg (2009) calls the “historical avant-garde”, Kentridge, in collaboration with composers Thuthuka Sibisi and Philip Miller, blurs the boundaries between opera, cabaret, performance art, and dance. The work presents sources such as Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate(1932), Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto(1918), and Schoenberg’s cabaret music in counterpoint with physical and musical artefacts of the late nineteenth-century colonial project. Intertextual references and original material interact across media to complicate singular readings of both visual and sonic signifiers. For critics, the result is a twenty-first century Gesamtkunstwerk. However, whereas Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerkanticipates the totalitarianism of the first half of the twentieth century, Kentridge’s work fractures notions of unity and totality. Through quotation, collage, and counterpoint, The Head & the Loadarticulates a fractured worldview at odds with Wagner’s absolutism. This is a Gesamtkunstwerkadapted for a continent ravaged by ideals of hegemony, hierarchy, and control—a continent on which breakdown becomes an aesthetic force unto itself. In this paper, I show how Kentridge’s heterogeneous artistic syntax destabilizes The Head & the Load’s inscription of a traditional operatic imaginary. Disrupting generic conventions, the piece imagines an operatic form that is responsive to the ambiguous presence of Western aesthetic ideals in the post-colony. This is the European avant-garde articulated through the colonial wound.