Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism
202
Performing Noncitizenship: Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism
202eBook
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Overview
This exacting study examines the role that theatre, film and activism responsive to asylum seekers has played in the emergence of ‘irregular’ noncitizenship as a cornerstone idea in contemporary Australian political and social life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783084340 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
| Series: | Anthem Australian Humanities Research Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 202 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Performing Noncitizenship
Asylum Seekers in Australian Theatre, Film and Activism
By Emma Cox
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2015 Emma CoxAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-434-0
CHAPTER 1
THE POLITICS OF INNOCENCE IN THEATRES OF REALITY
I have spent all my life between yes and no.
— Towfiq Al-Qady, Nothing But Nothing
Innocence, in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political status.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
At the start of the book I referred to one of the many tragedies at sea that have befallen asylum seekers transported on people-smuggling vessels across the heavily-patrolled waters between Indonesia and Australia. As I noted, the five deaths in this particular instance, following a large explosion of fuel on board the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 36, were found at a coronial inquest to be the result of deliberate sabotage by 'a passenger or passengers' (Cavanagh 5), that is, one or more of the asylum seekers aboard the boat, in an attempt to ensure that they would not be returned by Australian Navy personnel to Indonesia. Reports in the wake of the 2009 event speculated that the cause of the boat explosion had been deliberate, but before the findings of the 2010 coronial inquest were published, it was all too easy for asylum seeker advocates, including academics, to doubt the veracity of this claim, perhaps assuming it to be part of a general strategy of character assassination akin to that which underpinned the 'children overboard' scandal of 2001. But the speculation turned out to be warranted, as well as inconvenient for a politics that implicitly depends upon asylum seeker innocence as a key reason for compassion to be extended to them. Of course, the trouble with pegging asylum seekers' deservingness of humanitarian protection in Australia to innocence is that it promotes a morality instead of an ethics and that it struggles — indeed, is often unable — to absorb complex motivations, duplicity or recklessness: in the case of the boat explosion, a plea for asylum that turns into a deadly demand. That asylum seeking is, in Australia and other Western host nations, twinned with morality to the extent that it is sheds some light on the limited contexts in which discourses of hospitality find purchase in a globalized world increasingly dominated by partialist politics and authoritarian immigration regimes.
Media reporting on the 2010 coronial enquiry into SIEV 36 focused, appropriately enough, on the key finding of a deliberate ignition of petrol causing death, as well as on the actions of Australian Navy personnel. What didn't need to be emphasized was the way in which coroner Greg Cavanagh's report methodically registered the known particulars of the five deceased men, all Afghan nationals. Its cumulative effect is of unintentional poignancy. The following, pertaining to the first of the named deceased, is indicative:
Particulars required to register the death are:
a. The deceased was a male.
b. The deceased was Mohammed Hassan Ayubi.
c. The deceased was born in Afghanistan.
d. The death was reported to the Coroner.
e. The cause of death was drowning.
f. The forensic pathologist was Dr Terence John Sinton and he viewed the body after death.
g. The name of the deceased's mother is not known. h. The name of the deceased's father is not known.
i. The deceased was temporarily within the Territory of Ashmore and Cartier Islands.
j. The employment of the deceased is unknown.
k. The deceased was 45 years of age. (7)
The other four deaths are registered in much the same way. The details (which in many cases are non-details) read as harrowing absences, though of course they aren't meant to carry such inflection. These are the kinds of haunting characterizations that a documentary theatre account of the event and its aftermath is likely to home in on. But theatres of reality that engage with asylum too often skip over pieces of evidence that intervene in frames of loss and victimhood. Cavanagh also concluded the following in his report:
It is quite apparent when one compares the evidence of the Afghani witnesses to that which is depicted on the video, none of them are telling the truth. All of them are denying knowledge of events about which they must have some knowledge. Because they have all told similar lies I can only conclude that they have all to some extent colluded with each other and decided as a group to lie to this Inquest. (34)
If this statement is one that is difficult to imagine finding its way into a theatrical representation of asylum seekers' experiences under Australia's brutal immigration system, this signals, I argue, that Australian noncitizenship as it has emerged in theatrical guises has been corralled into a moral category, as innocent. Innocence here implies both constructions of non-culpability as well as meanings that are conventionally applied to minors, that is, subjects who are particularly susceptible or vulnerable to abusive power.
The presumption of innocence is a well-known cornerstone of many legal systems worldwide, including Australia's. But it is activated only in the context of criminal law, leaving in the contemporary world great swathes of civic life and political power structures in which it does not apply. Where the presumption of innocence does not negotiate the space between power and its implementation, something else emerges to fill the space. This can often be a pre-emptive presumption of non-innocence; for instance, a civic safeguard such as locking one's doors and windows or insuring one's property from theft. Antonella Galetta notes that 'the presumption of innocence does not benefit persons who are not charged with a criminal offence, as well as persons who are presumed of having committed a crime but not formally charged before a court' (Galetta). She argues that when the application of surveillance practices extends beyond the legal contexts in which the presumption of innocence is activated, significant social consequences ensue: '[t]he pre-emptive approach in policing exacerbated by the use of surveillance technologies spreads a great sense of suspicion within democratic societies. In turn, the use of technologies of suspicion threatens the typical relationship of trust that links citizens to the state, as well as the presumption of the individual's innocence' (Galetta). Galetta's discussion concerns civic surveillance technologies such as CCTV cameras (she doesn't mention surveillance of the Internet by the state, but this is a pervasive and urgent example), which may be understood as tools for a pre-emptive presumption of non-innocence.
It might at first glance appear that Australia's border surveillance technologies of maritime deterrence and forcible return, and of course its uber-technology of imprisonment for all unauthorized arrivals, are evidence of a pre-emptive presumption of non-innocence writ large. But they are, in fact, quite another thing entirely. I argued in the introduction to this book that Australia's asylum policies represent a comprehensive and long-standing state of exception, which Giorgio Agamben has variously characterized as a biopolitical condition where normal law and process are suspended, in exceptional circumstances, vis-à-vis exceptional bodies. Australia's border surveillance technologies and Australia's state of exception operate outside the contexts both of civic society and criminal law (at least in relation to asylum seekers: numerous prosecutions of captains and crew members of people-smuggling vessels have occurred in recent years). For noncitizens that it has 'captured outside' (Agamben, Means 40, italics in original), the exception or the ban does not activate a legal presumption of innocence nor a pre-emptive civic presumption of non-innocence. Andreas Schloenhardt and Hadley Hickson evaluate the principle of non-criminalization of smuggled migrants (guaranteed, as I noted in the introduction, under Article 5 of the UN Protocol Against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea, and Air) in the context of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers and identify a 'disturbing level of congruity' (61) between immigration detention and criminal imprisonment. What is just as disturbing here is how a UN principle designed to protect smuggled human beings can license its very opposite. Asylum seekers detained under Australia's asylum regime, Schloenhardt and Hickson observe, 'enjoy substantially fewer rights than persons convicted and imprisoned for committing criminal offences. They are denied the benefits and transparency of a judicial trial, face the possibility of indefinite detention if they cannot obtain a visa and if their removal cannot be arranged, and are deprived of the statutory guarantees of minimum detention conditions for convicted prisoners' (62–63). Australian immigration detention is not a measure that formally presumes innocence or guilt, even though it has the structural and symbolic effects of a guilt consensus, being enacted punitively and constructed in dominant discourse as the result of 'illegal' actions by 'illegal' noncitizens. Even worse, it is precisely through their non-criminalization that asylum seekers are cast into the most abject of biopolitical conditions.
Scholars have examined in some detail the theatricality or performativity of the law (for example, Peters; Brion), as well as theatre's capacity as social tribunal (for example, Botham; Monks) but the presumption of innocence, specifically, and the word itself have not been put under any real pressure in theatre and performance studies. Discussion in the humanities of how asylum is constructed in advocacy discourse and the arts has had more to say about the delimiting trope of victimhood than about constructions of innocence; in this sense such work has been indebted more to trauma theory than to political theory. Hannah Arendt, however, did recognize the important intersections between innocence, agency and en masse persecution; in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes that as the number of stateless people increased in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, 'the greater became the temptation to pay less attention to the deeds of the persecuting governments than to the status of the persecuted' (294), with the result that the persecuted became undifferentiated, unremarkable: 'they were and appeared to be nothing but human beings whose very innocence — from every point of view, and especially that of the persecuting government — was their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of complete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it was the seal of their loss of political status' (295). The way in which Arendt uses the word 'innocence' here differs from its application in a legalistic sense; she is describing not the presumption of innocence that is activated when a person enters a power relation under criminal law, but the innocence that exists as a default when a person stands outside that law. This distinction helps to explain how it is that exceptional Australian noncitizens activate neither a legal presumption of innocence nor a pre-emptive civic presumption of non-innocence.
Theatre that represents or responds in some way to these irregular noncitizens enters this aporia. It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that a moral presumption of innocence manifests in Australian theatre that engages counter-discursively with asylum issues precisely because asylum seekers have not been able to insert themselves formally within the terms of the legal presumption or even a civic pre-emptive presumption. (In terms of creative and political motivation, this is a basic premise of representation as recuperation.) I argue, therefore, that a politics of asylum seeker innocence in theatres of reality can be indexed to the consolidation of Australian biopolitical technologies that 'criminalize' irregular noncitizens in the absence of criminal proceedings under a state of exception. Moreover, I contend that, contrary to its well-placed application in criminal law, the more thoroughgoing the application of a presumption of moral innocence in the theatre, the less scope a play has to challenge, surprise, diversify and most importantly tell fuller stories about asylum seekers' lives in the contemporary world. This extends beyond characterization: my discussion scrutinizes ways in which the theatrical endeavour can posit or problematize itself terms of representational innocence via different dramaturgical strategies or techniques.
The four plays that provide case studies for this chapter operated as various kinds of theatres of reality, and they offer contrasting examples of how innocence is implicated both at the representational level of character (particularly moral persuasiveness) and in terms of the theatrical endeavour as a total practice. The first two are verbatim pieces and the second two are expressionistic works of autobiographical theatre. The plays are Through the Wire (2004–05), devised and directed by Australian Ros Horin; CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) (2004), devised by members of the Sydney performance company version 1.0; Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee's Story (2005), written and performed by Iraqi refugee Towfiq Al-Qady and supported by Actors for Refugees, Queensland; and Journey of Asylum — Waiting (2010), devised by Catherine Simmonds and members of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) in Melbourne. The first two plays may be categorized as verbatim plays, though Through the Wire was much closer in ethos to the tribunal verbatim theatre that has been quite prominent in the UK and the United States over the last ten to fifteen years, while CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) problematized its own status and capacity as a verbatim work. Through the Wire presented the testimonies of four asylum seekers and the Australian women that befriended and/or supported them whilst they were in immigration detention. In Through the Wire, Iranian actor, playwright and refugee Shahin Shafaei — the one person in the play to perform as himself — was instructed by his Australian director how to perform his own testimony; the other performers in Through the Wire are not refugees, but enacted refugees' testimonies in a mimetic fashion. In contrast, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) was devised from testimonies about asylum seekers: specifically, the 2002 Australian Senate Select Committee on the notorious 'children overboard' affair, summarized in the introduction to this book. CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) was far more circumspect about the transparency of the historical record, the innocence of testimony and its own innocence as a theatrical form. The other two works discussed in this chapter were devised from true stories and were performed by refugees, but they did not employ the classic documentary theatre technique of utilizing existing 'raw materials' from interviews, statements, tribunals and so on. In his emotional, impressionistic solo work, Nothing But Nothing, Al-Qady performed his own story (enacting his adult and child selves) and also took on the perspectives of his mother, daughter and fellow asylum seekers. The work was suffused with the desire of its protagonist to be recognized by audiences as an innocent subject. Journey of Asylum — Waiting employed a discontinuous narrative of vignettes derived from stories shared in group and one-to-one environments and organized by Simmonds into a performance text. While also preoccupied with making a case for the innocence of its refugee characters, this piece blurred distinctions between dramatized truth and fiction and questioned moreover the broader use of performance as a medium for asylum narratives.
All but one of the plays (CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)) involved performances by refugees, either as themselves or as non-autobiographical asylum seeker or refugee characters. And all but one of them (Nothing But Nothing) involved performances by Australians. These different representational modes had ethical, political, personal and aesthetic implications, as I will outline, but it is important to emphasize at the outset that representation in every case had a common starting point in the way asylum seeker noncitizenship has been made recognizable in contemporary Australia and indeed globally. As I noted in the introduction to this book, Alison Jeffers offers a compelling framework for thinking about expectations that are applied to refugee self-representation, inside and outside the theatre. She argues that asylum seekers who cross international borders become enmeshed in bureaucratic performances of 'refugeeness', being 'forced to play the role of "Convention refugees"' (Refugees 17) (a reference to the UN Refugee Convention), and in the process become conventional refugees, conforming to common expectations of suffering, powerlessness and victimhood. Conventional formulations of identity condition theatre made by and about refugees, constructing the spaces in which narratives can typically occur and the meanings that can be communicated between refugees and hosts. However, Jeffers also contends that '[w]hen bureaucratic performance reaches the limits of its usefulness, other narratives from theatrical and cultural performance take over, telling stories about some of the positive and complex experiences of refugeeness' (Refugees 40). But complexity doesn't always equate to moral ambiguity; indeed, I argue that the expectation that when a refugee speaks he or she is 'giving evidence' is so pervasive that it becomes exceedingly difficult to ethically circumvent constructions of refugees as innocent individuals. This goes for the kinds of stories that are told as well as the way in which they are heard. Innocence may function in this sense as a kind of narrative 'safeguard', gifted by those citizens who listen to the stories of asylum seekers and refugees, in the knowledge that the very act of narrativizing one's life is fraught with risk, and that the presumed 'guilt' of the noncitizen has already been instantiated by their exclusion under Australia's state of exception.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Performing Noncitizenship by Emma Cox. Copyright © 2015 Emma Cox. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Framing Noncitizenship; 1. The Politics of Innocence in Theatres of Reality; 2. Domestic Comedy and Theatrical Heterotopias; 3. Territories of Contact in Documentary Film; 4. The Pain of Others: Performance, Protest and Instrumental Self-Injury; 5. Welcome to Country? Aboriginal Activism and Ontologies of Sovereignty; Conclusion: A Global Politics of Noncitizenship; Notes; Bibliography; Index
What People are Saying About This
‘A welcomed addition to the growing field of theatre studies in exile, mass migration, and activism, this book offers a telling reading of today’s Australia. It is a society and a culture shaped anew in the emerging public debate on the strategies of survival, culture and artistic output of the country’s noncitizens.’ —Yana Meerzon, University of Ottawa
‘Examining the radical political and ethical possibilities that arise when refugees in Australia perform their exclusion from the political norm, Emma Cox goes beyond accounts of exclusion to trace how refugee theatre may offer the beginnings of new political forms that question the restriction of political speech and political action to citizens.’ —Prem Kumar Rajaram, Central European University, Budapest
‘This book offers a vital new perspective on the legal, social and affective interactions between Australian citizens and asylum seekers. Emma Cox’s rigorous analysis of activism and performance in the context of asylum has implications for all refugee-receiving countries.’ —Agnes Woolley, Royal Holloway, University of London
‘A thought-provoking and timely study of Australian asylum issues. The central concept of “noncitizenship” introduces an innovative theoretical framework that inspires application beyond the book’s immediate case studies. This is an excellent and important contribution to performance and asylum scholarship.’ —Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick