This book explores a selection of representations of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian theatre, film and activism, and theorizes their significance in relation to the concept of ‘noncitizenship’. Instead of focusing on how theatre and related forms of cultural production might help promote belonging and membership within national communities, this study aims to show how such production has helped entrench the idea of ‘irregular’ noncitizenship in contemporary Australian political and social life, to the extent that ‘it has become impossible to imagine what Australia means without it’ (back cover). Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's work, including his analysis of the way the concentration camp exemplifies a permanent ‘state of exception’ where the normal rule of law is suspended (p. 5), Emma Cox's study sets out to explain what performances of noncitizenship say about ‘what it looks and feels like to be Australian in the twenty-first century’ (p. 7).

The book is organised into five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on ‘the politics of innocence’, offering a sophisticated reading of the limits of agency involved in enactments of innocence by/of asylum seekers, how this precludes them from being political actors, and how they ‘may end up presenting themselves, as always and fundamentally acted upon’ (p. 59, emphasis in the original). Chapter 2 explores the ‘intimate territoriality of the home’ by analysing two satirical comedies, The Rainbow Dark (2006) and The Pacific Solution (2006), which transpose the issue of asylum into the domestic space (p. 10). This chapter foregrounds the subversiveness of comedy, and demonstrates how the simultaneous exclusion and inclusion that is enacted in Agamben's conception of the extrajudicial detention zone can be traced in the two plays where the asylum seekers are portrayed as being ‘kept outside’, yet held within, their domestic Australian settings. The third chapter addresses two documentary films, Letters to Ali (2004) and Hope (2007), with the analysis focusing on how they elicit affective audience responses to the portrayal of the emotional contact between ‘filmmakers and their subjects, and between citizen and noncitizen’ (p. 86). Chapter 4 explores how theatre and performance intersect with the protests and acts of self-harm that detainees have carried out. This chapter draws on Agamben's conceptualization of the homo sacer, of a person stripped of legal status who must turn to perpetual flight or a foreign land, to make sense of the detention of a group of people who are excluded from political participation. Cox considers the extent to which the self-injury by asylum seekers, when juxtaposed against the ‘hard labour’ of incarceration, might be conceived as ‘anti-work’ that signals an ‘ethical malaise at the national level’ (p. 137). The final chapter explores Aboriginal activist support for asylum seekers. While some Australians opposed to the harsh treatment of refugees by the state might insist that ‘these are not Australian values’, Cox argues that the outrage expressed by Aboriginal activists insists on the subtle distinction: ‘Australian values are not our values’ (p. 157).

Within this book, engagement with refugees is situated primarily as a desire by cultural producers and activists to redefine their own conceptions of ‘Australian-ness’. However, the final chapter suggests a reading of asylum-seeker advocacy that is not primarily motivated by an allegiance to the sense of ‘reconstituted nationalism’ that underscores the book's central argument. The book's ‘nationalist’ focus and the attendant emphasis on ‘citizen rights’ is difficult to reconcile with conceptions of ‘global citizenship’ and the commitment to upholding inalienable human rights that might also help to explain the motivations of activists and artists responding to the plight of refugees. In Cox's study, citizenship is implicitly linked to a focus on political and civic rights tied to membership of, or exclusion from, the nation state. Such a conceptual framework ultimately reinforces the primacy of nationalist discourses and the centrality of the state.

Cox's book offers penetrating analysis, but the complexity of the language could make it difficult to include it as set reading on teaching curricula. Nevertheless, through her conceptualization of noncitizenship, Cox provides a useful tool that further illuminates the implications of denying various groups of people political or legal participation.