This book explores the notion of home in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis, and asks how home and belonging can be rethought through the act of creative practices and collective writing with refugees and asylum seekers. Where Giorgio Agamben calls the refugee ‘the figure of our time’, this study places the question of home among those who experience its ruptures. Veering away from treating the refugee as a conceptual figure, the lived experiences and creative expressions of seeking asylum in Denmark and the United Kingdom are explored instead. The study produces a theoretical framework around home by drawing from a cross-disciplinary field of existential and political philosophy, narratology, performance studies and anthropology. Moreover, it argues that theatre studies is uniquely positioned to understand the performative and storied aspects of seeking asylum and the compromises of belonging made through the asylum process.
Author(s): Helene Grøn
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 266
City: London
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’
1.1 ‘The Place of a Thousand Belongings’: Home as a Critical Lens
1.2 Home and Belonging in Refugee Performance
1.3 Interdisciplinary Methodology
1.4 Chapter Overview
1.5 ‘Den Smukke Fortælling’: Political Considerations
References
Chapter 2: Ontologies of Belonging: Philosophical, Historical and Narratological Considerations
2.1 Ontologies of Belonging
2.2 Belonging and Human Rights
2.3 The Nation and Belonging: ‘To Be Rooted’
2.4 Narratology and Belonging: ‘Not Just Be-ing, But Long-ing’
2.5 Compromised Belongings
References
Chapter 3: Dramaturgical Ethics: Undoing and Decreating
3.1 Dramaturgy, Ethics and Refugee Performance: Engaging ‘With a Story Beyond Our Telling’
3.2 No Pure Place to Stand: An Argument for Critical Closeness
3.3 Shifting the Ground: Participating Through Decreating
3.4 Standing on Stage: Understanding Responsibility as a Theatre Maker
References
Chapter 4: Ethnoplaywriting: Creating Belonging
4.1 Theatre and Ethnography: Mapping Terminology and Practices
4.2 Political Listening and Vulnerable Observing
4.3 Therapeutic Commitments: Can Stories Heal?
4.4 Theatre as a Home, Writing as Belonging
4.5 Letting It Break Your Heart: ‘An Aesthetics of Care’
References
Chapter 5: Rebooting the Social Contract: Trampoline House and Deportation Centre Sjælsmark
5.1 Sjælsmark—‘Souls’ Field’: Creating the Unhomely
5.2 Trampoline House: Performing Democracy and Rebooting the Social Contract
The House’s Own Parliament: Democracy as Performative Process
Institutional Creativity: My House, Your House
5.3 Person = Country: Belonging as a Human Right
References
Chapter 6: Fieldwork Reflection: ‘Not Just Theatre, Also Politics, Law’—Making Theatre in Deportation Centre Sjælsmark
6.1 Creating the Map of Non-belonging
6.2 Writing a Letter to a Danish Person
6.3 Narratable Versus Narrated Self or ‘to Learn About Beauty’
6.4 Resisting the Refugee Narrative
6.5 The Helicopter Is Waiting Outside
Appendix: This Is Us
References
Chapter 7: ‘You Are Enough, You Belong With Us’: Reimagining Sisterhood as Collective Belonging
7.1 The Youth Community Support Agency
7.2 In the Company of Women: Intersectional Sisterhood
7.3 Living Life in a Pause: Of Being Blue and New
‘Where Are You From? A Woman’s Body’: Poetry Is Not a Luxury
References
Chapter 8: Fieldwork Reflection: The Sistas and Amazing Amelia
8.1 She Travels in Worlds of…
8.2 Writing Amazing Amelia
8.3 Being Amazing Amelia at the Glad Café and the UNESCO Spring School
8.4 ‘But She’s Not the Amelia Earhart You Know’
Appendix: Amazing Amelia Or We Are All Amelias
References
Chapter 9: Conclusion: ‘Much Home’
9.1 What Is the Point of Theatre?
9.2 How Much Home? Doubly Possible and the Better Imagined
References
Index
