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.

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.

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