After Farce: Ubu, the Imperialist - Notes - e-flux

Réincarnations du Père Ubu, 1932.

As they recovered from the immediate shock and disbelief following the election of Donald Trump to his first term in office, artists, theater-makers, poets, and critics across the United States responded by comparing this unscrupulous social climber to the protagonist of Alfred Jarry’s late nineteenth-century farce Ubu the King. The rotund figure was there, to be sure, along with the crudeness, vulgar ambition, greed, and indulgence in the lowest instincts of human nature. There were endless posts on social media and a host of essays and articles in scholarly journals, art projects featuring Ubu, and, of course, theater productions of Jarry’s play and its updates.1 The question that underlined many of these invocations of Jarry’s creation was: How could this happen to us, an advanced democracy, with robust institutions, free media, and a well-established political system? The answer seemed to arrive at the conclusion of Trump’s first term, with the January 6 melee, an event that might have belonged in an Ubuesque farce, except that people actually died in this orgy of boorishness. Yet few paused to consider that it was, in fact, a brutal publicity stunt that helped jump-start Trump’s reelection campaign.

Trump’s second term has not been a rerun of his first. This time he came prepared, with Project 2025 in place, and with techno-oligarchs and other big-business bosses lined up to kiss his knee, and the First Lady’s.2 The second year of Trump’s first term saw the “National UBU ROI Bake-Off,” a program of new Ubu-themed theater works organized by playwright Paula Vogel that featured a monologue by Melania Trump. In the second term, the same milestone was marked instead by the documentary Melania, produced by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. In the chapter “Père Trump” of his book What Comes After Farce? the art critic Hal Foster fires off a salvo of questions: “How to belittle a leader who cannot be embarrassed? Or to mock one who thrives on the absurd? How to out-dada President Ubu?”3 Now we have the answers to all these questions, including the one from the title: what comes after farce is its normalization. The second Trump presidency has exceeded anything Jarry imagined in his portrait of an autocrat. If, the first time around, Trump scandalized the international political order, this time he is actively remaking it. While back in the late 2010s he occasionally offered verbal support to authoritarians the world over, this time around he has turned the White House into a conservative Comintern, investing in those he supports (Argentina’s president Javier Melei) and actively harassing those he and his compadres dislike (the leaders of Brazil, Mexico, and Canada, and the entire EU, with the heavy penalties it is imposing on Silicon Valley firms). Having moved from bullying friend and foe (more the former than the latter) to pursuing overtly imperial ambitions—using the US military to abduct a sitting foreign president and proclaiming further territorial designs—Trump appears to exceed even Jarry’s repertoire of Ubu’s excesses.

In the conclusion to Jarry’s farce, we find Ubu in retreat after his defeat in Russia, sailing along the shores of Denmark, presumably on his way to his nonexistent realm (“If there were no Poland, there would be no Poles!”).4 Well, he kept going until he reached and promptly colonized warmer lands. The depiction of Ubu’s imperialist exploits stands at the center of an almost forgotten literary venture by Ambroise Vollard, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century art dealer who played a pivotal role in launching the careers of several major modernist painters, including Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. In the 1890s, Vollard published artists’ portfolios by some of the painters he exhibited, such as Paul Gauguin. Moving in the same circles of symbolist bohemia as Jarry, Vollard provided financial support for Père Ubu’s Illustrated Almanac (1899) by purchasing advertising space in it. The idea for the second (and last) publication in this series, Père Ubu’s Illustrated Almanac (20th century) (1901), originated at one of the dinners that Vollard hosted in his basement on Rue Laffitte in Paris.5 In his memoirs, he recorded that Jarry came up with the idea for a “colonial issue” after he heard the art dealer’s stories about the French island colony La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, where Vollard had been born and raised. In the end, the only evidently colonial segment of the Almanac was the play Ubu Colonialist *(1901), which, according to avant-garde lore, was primarily authored by Vollard himself.6 Vollard returned to Ubu several years after Jarry died in 1907, at the age of thirty-four. Starting in 1916, Vollard wrote and published a series of Ubu plays: first *Pa Ubu at the Hospital and Pa Ubu in the Health Service (1916), Pa Ubu in Aviation (1918), The Colonial Politics of Pa Ubu (1919), and Pa Ubu in the War (1920). He collected these plays in the volume Reincarnations of Pa Ubu (1925), which also included the short dramatic skits Pa Ubu in the Postal Service and Pa Ubu at the Pantheon, the prose miniature The Political Testament of Pa Ubu, and the longest of all of Vollard’s Ubu plays, The Colonial Problems at the League of Nations. Finally, in 1930 he published his final Ubu play, Pa Ubu in the Land of Soviets. Vollard’s booklets were illustrated with haunting woodcuts by Georges Rouault, one of the artists he represented.

Ubu Colonialist is dominated by the figure of the rogue autocrat that Jarry developed over the previous decade: opportunistic, a bottom feeder, a brute, and a coward; laconic, self-serving, and relentlessly self-promoting. Yet the colonial setting exposes another important facet of Ubu: on top of everything else, and quite predictably, he is a racist. The main political insight of Jarry’s play concerns colonial societies in the aftermath of slavery; this insight almost certainly came from Vollard. Before Ubu spouts racist clichés about the laziness of slaves (illustrated by a story about the mysterious illness “tatane” that overtakes them when they are forced to work), crude claims about natives’ consumption of rats, bigoted comments about Black prostitutes, and colonial exoticisms about crocodiles and ostriches, he delivers a salvo of complaints about being denied the “right” to buy slaves. The abolition of slavery deprived him of that genuinely Ubuesque indulgence. Out of “pure philanthropy,” “we” (the former slavers) have turned slaves into “free workers,” “since that is the custom in Parisian factories.” He continues, pompously: “Desiring to make them all happy and to keep them in good health, we promised them, if they were very good, to grant them, upon the expiration of ten years of free work in our service, and granted a favorable report from our warden, the right to vote and to make their own children.”7 This is atypical for Jarry. Beneath the farcical façade, this playlet contains an insightful analysis of the colonial condition.

Jarry began developing the character of Ubu when he was a teenager in Rennes, together with his high school friends, the brothers Henri and Charles Morin.8 From the very beginning, his Ubu plays offered a portrayal of patriarchal bourgeois order seen from below, by those deprived of power, first children and then the bohemians at the margins of society. This perspective was obscured by the farcical and obscene means he used to depict it. In Vollard’s hands, the Ubu corpus became more studious and incisive. For him, the farce was not the medium, but the fact of the matter. Born in the distant colonies to a “Creole” mother and a French father, Vollard was intimately familiar with the inequalities and injustices of colonial societies. Equally important was his position as the internal outsider—a French citizen born overseas—which enabled him to observe and understand not only the deep, violently imposed divisions between the metropole and its colonies, but more importantly the vital continuities between them. Vollard’s Ubu plays, particularly The Colonial Politics of Pa Ubu, offer insights that can illuminate the seemingly inexplicable imperialist exploits of the Trump administration.

Already on the morning of January 3, 2026, political commentators and experts on Latin America and US foreign policy started debating the US military operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. In his address to the nation, President Trump mentioned, in passing, the drug cartels, and made it clear that the main prize was Venezuela’s oil. That didn’t make much sense to careful analysts. Questions kept swirling. A week after the Maduro “extraction,” Ezra Klein, the voice of reason at the* New York Times* opinion pages, enumerated the problems with Trump’s explanation: Trump ran on a platform of not involving the US in foreign military campaigns, and yet he did exactly that; it can’t be drugs, since the US is in the grips of a fentanyl crisis, and the main drug smuggled through Venezuela is cocaine; the removal of Maduro did not bring into power the conservative opposition leader María Corina Machado—who, in an Ubuesque gesture of sycophancy, first dedicated and then gifted her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump—but instead left in charge the Chavista vice president, Delcy Rodríguez; and even the oil, however tempting it might be, isn’t a compelling reason since the US has reached energy independence and is actually one of the world’s major oil exporters; and further, it would take years for American big oil to start making profits from Venezuelan deposits.9 Alma Guillermoprieto, an astute observer of Latin American affairs, concluded a commentary she wrote for the* New York Review of Books* by posing a question that was on everyone’s mind: “What was that all for?”10 Similar questions were prompted by Trump’s intimation that he might pursue further imperial exploits in Canada (the fifty-first state?), Greenland, maybe Cuba, or perhaps Columbia. Vollard provides a useful guide for the perplexed.

The Colonial Politics of Pa Ubu takes the form of a hearing before the Colonial Commission in the Parliament (CCP), with Ubu’s primary interlocutor being its president (PCCP). They go quickly over typical Ubuesque preliminaries, such as his suggestion that, while rich colonies can easily become the target of other colonial powers, a “colony that produces nothing” remains perfectly safe.11 It does not take long for Ubu to introduce distinctly Trumpian themes. He raises concerns about border security in the colonies and dismisses economic experts as “jackasses” (13). The hearing acquires a more serious tone when one of the members of the CCP invokes Ubu’s study trip to America, where he had the opportunity to review the Monroe Doctrine. From this point, the hearing shifts from the question of the sustainability of colonies to electoral politics. In essence, Vollard picks up where Jarry (and he himself) left off in Ubu Colonialist: How to make a colonist into a voter? The entire second part of the play is dedicated to exploring this question.

This is precisely where Vollard departs from farce, signaling this departure explicitly. Ubu recalls an incident from his time as undersecretary of state for the colonies, when a “colonial representative” questioned him about “Bamboula.” Ubu admits that he had been naive, initially believing it to be a “black dance held in high esteem in the Republic of Liberia” (23). But then he fires off his trademark profanity, “merdre,”* *directly in the face of the representative.12 The play then takes a decisive turn. Leaving Jarry’s farce behind, Vollard’s Ubu addresses the real significance of Bamboula: he explains to the parliamentary commission that it stands “for the good voter” who “had been raped by the bad voter” (23). The objective, he declares, is to “make the bad voters vote properly” even if that means “to diligently have them beaten or even put dynamite cartridges up their asses” (25). Here, the debate takes on recognizable Trumpian tones. “A Voice” suddenly interrupts, asking whether such measures are “contrary to the provisions of the law?” Ubu’s response is predictably blunt: “It is necessary, even imperative, to teach the bad voter the key electoral word”: “voting correctly means voting for the ‘right candidate’” (26). Becoming a good voter has clear advantages, such as “having a clear conscience,” and also “receiving, for personal consumption, or even for one’s family, on election days, a card granting academic honors, patent leather shoes, fresh butter gloves, and other such things” (28)—perhaps things like entry into a million-dollar sweepstake, or a $2,000 tariff dividend. But corruption is not enough. There are other ways to fully “nationalize” elections, such as voter suppression. Ubu discloses that further “preparatory work is needed to prevent bad voters from entering the polling stations on election days” (29). His tirade here unmistakably echoes Trump’s derogatory remarks about major American cities controlled by Democrats:13

I have seen weeds growing in the streets of the city, I have seen, wandering around in them, chickens, ducks, porcupines, rattlesnakes, or even non-venomous snakes, earthworms, or even silkworms, dogs, or even sea dogs, cats, rats, mice, moles, rabbits, seagulls, skylarks, Guinea pigs, sparrows, fleas, oysters, ants, whales, mosquitoes, and other obstacles to traffic; you are a mayor who does not concern himself with the good condition of the streets in his town; we are replacing you with a commission of good voters. (30)

From sanitizing the streets in Trump’s first term to armed invasion in his second there is but one short step, and that step is enabled and justified by a decidedly imperialistic logic. This comes off as perfectly normal to those who are familiar with the “colonial adage, which is wisdom itself: ‘He who controls the municipality controls the ballot box; He who controls the ballot box holds the key to success” (31). At this point, it is not clear if Ubu is talking about the colonies or the metropole, but it doesn’t matter. The point that Vollard’s play makes so clearly is that imperialism is not, and can never be, unidirectional: expansionism abroad is inseparable from total domination in the metropole. In other words, imperialism always begins at home. Once set in motion, imperialist violence necessarily comes back, made inevitable by its own logic. Caracas and Minneapolis are two poles in the same whirlpool of aggression. To find the meaning of the intervention in Venezuela and predatory talk aimed at Denmark and Canada, we need to look at the streets of major American cities flooded by ICE agents and other federales, backed by the Department of Justice, the Supreme Court, and other top institutions.

It is important to remember that in Vollard’s play, Ubu presents his political program to the highest legislative body. By the end the hearing, the PCCP lodges one final objection: What happens once no one votes for the “wrong candidate” anymore? Ubu is ready for this: provide “votes of encouragement to the bad candidate”—in other words, install a puppet opposition (33). Writing in 1919, Vollard could see what was coming. In his final appearance, Ubu addresses the League of Nations. That play was dated 1925, three years after Mussolini’s march on Rome. Today we can only hope that we don’t get that far.

For a brief outline of some deployments of Ubu Roi in artists’ responses to the first Trump election, see my short article “Père Gynt: Mendacity for the 21st Century,” TDR: The Drama Review 64, no. 3 (2020).

Not the ring: the knee. See chapter eight of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, depicting the great ball presided over by the “eternally suntanned” Master and his chosen one. Trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor (Vintage Books, 1996), 217.

Hal Foster, What Comes After Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (Verso 2020), 41.

Alfred Jarry, Ubu the King, in Three Pre-Surrealist Plays, trans. Maya Slater (Oxford University Press, 1997), 147.

Alastair Brotchie, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life (MIT Press, 2011), 268.

Brotchie, Alfred Jarry, 269.

Alfred Jarry, Tout Ubu: Ubu roi, Ubu cocu, Ubu enchâiné, Almanachs du père Ubu, Ubu sur la butte; avec leurs prolégomènes et paralipomènes (Librairie Générale Française, 1962), 422–23. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are by Jasminka Jakovljević and the author.

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I (Vintage Books, 1955), 188.

• The Ezra Klein Show*, January 11, 2026.

Alma Guillermoprieto, “A More Pliant Chavista,” New York Review of Books 73, no. 2 (February 2, 2026), 8.

Ambroise Vollard, Les Réincarnations de Père Ubu (Le Divan, 1925), 12.

Jarry’s King Ubu *opens with this untranslatable word derived from “shit” (merde*). According to one of the most credible legends of the theatrical avant-garde, the enunciation of this word on the opening night of Jarry’s play caused a riot in the small symbolist theater where it was performed.

See, for example, Trump’s comments about San Francisco reported by NBC News in September 2019: “Trump Threatens San Francisco with EPA Violation because of City’s Homeless” →.