1st Edition
Performance, Resistance and Refugees
This book offers a unique Australian perspective on the global crisis in refugee protection.
Using performance as both an object and a lens, this volume explores the politics and aesthetics of migration control, border security and refugee resistance. The first half of the book, titled On Stage, examines performance objects such as verbatim and documentary plays, children’s theatre, immersive performance, slam poetry, video art and feature films. Specifically, it considers how refugees, and their artistic collaborators, assert their individuality, agency and authority as well as their resistance to cruel policies like offshore processing through performance. The second half of the book, titled Off Stage, employs performance as a lens to analyse the wider field of refugee politics, including the relationship between forced migrants and the forced displacement of First Nations peoples that underpins the settler-colonial state, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, the role of the canon in art history and the spectacle of bordering practices. In doing so, it illuminates the strategic performativity—and nonperformativity—of the law, philosophy, the state and the academy more broadly in the exclusion and control of refugees.
Taken together, the chapters in this volume draw on, and contribute to, a wide range of disciplines including theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, border studies and forced migration studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in all four fields.
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Contributors' Biographies
Introduction: Performance, Refuge and Resistance
Suzanne Little, Samid Suliman and Caroline Wake
On Stage
Chapter 1 Refugees, Visual Culture and Theatre: Reinscriptions and Contestations
Suzanne Little
Chapter 2 The Breath of Another: Mediated Testimony in the Play Manus
Anna Szörényi
Chapter 3 Eschewing Precarity in Spoken Word Poetry: Towards the Performance of Agency in Refugee Storytelling
Sukhmani Khorana
Chapter 4 Manus Island and Kurdistan in Juxtaposition: Reading Remain and Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time Beyond the Story of the Manus Prison
Zhila Gholami
Chapter 5 Offshore Onstage: Refugee Policies, Media Ecologies and Migrant Dramaturgies in Australia, 2001–2021
Caroline Wake
Off Stage
Chapter 6 Trouble on the Horizon
Suvendrini Perera
Chapter 7 The Anxiety of Cosmopolitanism in Political Philosophy
Nikos Papastergiadis
Chapter 8 How to Appear? Writing Art History in Australia after 1973
Verónica Tello
Chapter 9 Nomocide or the Nonperformativity of Colonial Law
Maria Giannacopoulos
Chapter 10 Putting on a Show: Considering the Dark Matter of Australian Border Theatre
Samid Suliman
Index
Contributors
Maria Giannacopoulos is Associate Professor of Criminology in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Born to post-war migrants from Greece and experiencing life on unceded Gadigal lands, she remains impacted by and driven to unravel the workings of white supremacy and Indigenous dispossession. She has degrees in law, literature and a PhD in Cultural Studies. She works across the disciplines of law and criminology to reveal the complicity of Australian law with ongoing colonialism.
Zhila Gholami was recently awarded her PhD in Literary Studies by Griffith University. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Roots and Routes: Kurdish Literature as World Literature’, explored the negotiations of traumatic memory in English-language Kurdish writing as a way of understanding how the Kurdish people struggle for recognition and self-determination in and through diasporic cultural production. She is currently a Resident Adjunct with the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, working on the initial phase of a longer-term project on contemporary Kurdish art in cosmopolitan art spaces. This project builds on her PhD research, and will explore the mobilities and immobilities through which contemporary Kurdish visual artists are pursuing the struggle for recognition, justice, and self-determination in transnational contexts. Her work has recently been published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
Sukhmani Khorana is a Vice Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow at the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at University of Wollongong. Sukhmani has published extensively on diasporic cultures, multi-platform refugee narratives, and the politics of empathy. She is the author of Mediated Emotions of Migration: Reclaiming Affect for Agency (2022) and The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia (2018), editor of Crossover Cinema: Cross-Cultural Film from Production to Reception (2013) and co-editor - with Alberto Bellocchi, Jordan McKenzie, Michelle Peterie, Rebecca E. Olson and Roger Patulny - of Emotions in Late Modernity (2019).
Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, based at the University of Melbourne. He is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and founder—with Scott McQuire—of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. His publications include On Art and Friendship (2020). Museums of the Commons, (2020), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Metaphor and Tension (2004), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), and Modernity as Exile (1993). He is also the author of numerous essays, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki and Documenta 13.
Suvendrini (Suvendi) Perera is John Curtin Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts at Curtin University. Her most recent book is Mapping Deathscapes: Digital Geographies of Racial and Border Violence coedited with Joseph Pugliese (Routledge 2021).
Anna Szörényi is a Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research centres on ethical responsibility and representation in contemporary humanitarian media, particularly artistic and visual representations of forced migration, refugees/asylum seekers, and human trafficking. Her most influential work is on refugee photography. She has published in journals including Social Semiotics, Australian Feminist Studies, Feminist Review, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, and Visual Studies, among other fora.
Verónica Tello is a Chilean-Australian art historian based at UNSW Art & Design, Sydney. Her work is dedicated to engaging and animating queer and migratory archives in/across Australia and Latin America. In 2016, she published her first book Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury). Her second book, Future Souths: 8 Dialogues on Art, Place and History is forthcoming with Third Text Publications and Discipline, and includes the writing of Dylan AT Minder, Jennifer Biddle, Carla Macchiavello, Zoe Butt, Chandra Frank, Salote Tawale, Rachel O’Reilly and Walter Mignolo amongst others. She is currently finalising a manuscript on the exhibition history of Art in Chile: An Audio-Visual Documentation (1986, co-curated by Juan Daìvila and Nelly Richard) and the accompanying catalogue/book Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile Since 1973 with Sebastiaìn Valenzuela-Valdivia.
Biography
Suzanne Little is Senior Lecturer and the Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
Samid Suliman is Senior Lecturer in Migration and Security in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.
Caroline Wake is Senior Lecturer of Theatre and Performance at the University of NSW, Australia.
