It has often been remarked that Australia gained an international reputation for hard-line asylum policy in mid-2001 when the cargo vessel Tampa crossed into its territorial waters carrying several hundred rescued asylum seekers, instigating a stand-off and a hastily devised offshore immigration detention system that has embedded itself in law and the national psyche ever since. But as Performance, Resistance, and Refugees reminds readers, the settler-colonial nation’s practices of racially motivated exclusion go back far earlier than this. On the matter of refugees, at least, Australia has provided an emboldening template (or a case study in neo-imperial possibilities) for other polities, most obviously the UK, whose ignominious Rwanda solution has been proposed by a Prime Minister using the tried and tested words, ‘Stop the Boats.’ It is therefore surprising to read that Performance, Resistance, and Refugees explicitly aims to respond to what its editors – Suzanne Little, Samid Suliman, and Caroline Wake – identify as a diminished attention in the most recent wave of research on asylum and performance (which encompasses the last decade) to Australia and its contexts.
This collection of essays in fact offers more than a geopolitical corrective; so too is it more than a recuperation of Australia in the context of diverse arts ecologies. The book’s bold contribution – not immediately evident from its title – is to insist on and to demonstrate the multifaceted entanglements of asylum and colonialism, art-making and politics, history and law, and to present this insistence across ten original chapters that offer a truly interdisciplinary set of insights. The volume is edited by two performance scholars and a scholar of migration and security; their approach is to think capaciously about and through performance, both as representational form and as a ‘methodological orientation towards political analysis’. The book’s chapters are divided into two halves: the first five concern visual, theatrical, and cinematic work, and the second expand the scope to law, art history, and political theory. Chapters variously comprise close readings, surveys, part-memoir, and theoretical intervention.
Little’s chapter comparing and contextualizing two Australian and two UK theatrical works, along with Anna Szörényi’s chapter on a Persian-language Australian production, offer valuable insights into documentary forms, both established and emerging, particularly verbatim theatre. Zhila Gholami examines cinematic works (by Hoda Afshar and Arash Kamali Sarvestani) set in the formerly Australian-run Manus Island detention centre. Both films feature prominent Iranian Kurdish writer and former detainee, Behrouz Boochani. Gholami’s analysis is infused with her positionality as a Kurd, which enabled her to translate for fellow viewers but also generated an inexpressible, untranslatable mode of seeing.
Wake’s chapter, which concludes Part 1, deftly traces contexts and trends in refugee-responsive theatre, identifying how Australian policy determines theatre’s conditions of possibility: specifically, that the entrenchment of offshore detention ‘renders asylum seekers even more distant’ and voids the affective space of collaboration. Wake also detects a parallel shift, whereby the proliferation of social media and smartphones has meant that the witnessing role of activist ‘intermediaries’ has declined and refugees now (by compulsion and necessity) document their own exclusion.
In Part 2, Verónica Tello proposes an ‘undisciplined’ approach to Australian Chilean contemporary art historiography ‘after 1973’. Using first-person, then second-person address to frame art and migratory histories as excavatory memoir, Tello’s chapter draws attention to how Chilean migrants’ trans-Pacific flight paths ‘mimicked’ the imperial maritime routes of Captain Cook; she also signals continuities with the policed trajectories of maritime refugees.
Maria Giannacopoulos draws on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the ‘nonperformativity’ of anti-racism to characterize Australian colonial law in terms of self-exculpation: a system that is ‘doing something but not the thing named’. The chapter offers a critical historicization of the Mabo (No. 2) Australian High Court ruling (1992) and its effect of guarding white sovereignty – with its power to reject refugees – even as it declared the overturning of terra nullius. Tello’s and Giannacopoulos’s chapters are attentive to how experiential knowledges are bound up with research methodologies, and both associate histories of cultural erasure with racialized self-consciousness and acts of passing/appearance rooted in Australian colourism.
Performance, Resistance, and Refugees concludes with Suliman’s chapter on the ‘Dark Matter’ of Australia’s performative border security system. In an astute application of performance concepts to systems of political violence, Suliman shows how, in the context of asylum, performance is imbricated with invisibilization. The final section of this final chapter draws on Andrew Sofer’s dramaturgical theorization of dark matter in order to highlight troubled and persistent affiliations between offshore and offstage.
