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.
