Affect, belonging, community : asylum seekers and refugees in performance and writing in post-2001 Australia

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation examines the production and function of representations of asylum in writing and performance in Australia since 2001. It encompasses creative work that portrays asylum seekers (people whose protection claim has not been assessed) and refugees (people whose status has been determined within the terms of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) as well as work that engages with the issue of asylum more broadly. My selection of performative work includes theatrical production, performative art installation, protest action and film, and my selection of written work includes novels, poetry, memoirs, short stories and letters. The timeframe of the analysis acknowledges 2001 as a decisive period in the development of punitive national policy (and ideology) on unauthorised asylum seekers, concurrent with the escalation of sovereign security discourse worldwide after 11 September, that continue to inflect Australia's engagement with non-belonging non-citizens. If the upheavals of 2001 and concomitant proliferation of creative arts response mark the starting point of this study, the last two years have presented a renewed intensification of the challenges faced by the world's displaced. Recent global economic crises have heightened the vulnerability of people living in economically and politically unstable parts of the world, prompting an increase in refugee numbers; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, stated in a press conference with the Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Evans, in February 2009 that recent economic deterioration is an "accelerating factor" upon the existing pressures that force people movements, and moreover, a "generator of xenophobia" directed at refugees in many parts of the world.

In its emphasis on creative and cultural work in writing and performance, approached to a significant extent in terms of counter-representations to (usually) pejorative government and news media discourse, this project speaks to crucial questions posed by Suvendrini Perera, writing in response to the Tampa incident of 2001: "The terrain of representation, of language, imagery and narrative ... emerges as a crucial site for contesting the disconnection and separation of refugees and asylum seekers from wider society. What representations of refugees, other than official ones, are available in the public sphere? What are the forms and modalities by which refugee stories are told and made visible?" ("A Line" 32-3). Despite its broad analytical umbrella, encompassing writing and performance - both forms that themselves contain a number of representational modalities - created by Australians and by refugees, this study can only begin to provide an answer to Perera's questions. In doing so, it develops an overarching (though by no means exclusive) theoretical concern with affective cross-cultural engagement. I endeavour to illustrate some of the ways in which selected creative representations construct spaces of affective contact and connection between human lives separated-in-proximity by sovereign demarcations of national community.