Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting

Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting
Author: Helene Grøn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2023-06-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3031248082

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.

Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Civil Society

Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Civil Society
Author: Feyzi Baban
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2024-09-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429575246

This book discusses the ways civil society initiatives open communities to newcomers and why, how, and under what circumstances some are more welcoming than others, exploring the importance of transgressive cosmopolitanism as a basis for creating more inclusive and pluralistic societies. The question of how to live together in increasingly multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multireligious societies is a pressing political and policy issue, particularly as we witness a rise in right-wing populism and anti-immigrant sentiments. This book addresses the limitations of approaches that seek to secure borders, preventing the arrival of newcomers altogether, or that vacillate between assimilation and multiculturalism. The authors explore the concept of cosmopolitanism and its utility, by theorizing from real-world examples, including Germany’s Welcome Culture and Denmark’s Kind Citizens movements and other smaller-scale initiatives, such as arts and museum projects, kitchen hubs, and shared living accommodation. Interdisciplinary in nature and bringing conceptual discussions together with everyday examples, this book focuses on forms of activity generally left out of wider debates around protest and social movement literature. It emphasizes different types of activities undertaken by civil society groups, who do not necessarily self-identify as political, but whose activities can counter right-wing populism. This dialogue between concepts and everyday politics makes the volume a very useful companion to classroom discussion and will facilitate its own exchange between scholars, activists, and practitioners.

Marat/Sade ; The Investigation ; and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman

Marat/Sade ; The Investigation ; and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman
Author: Peter Weiss
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826409638

Peter Weiss (1916-1982) was virtually unknown in the mid-1960s when Peter Brook made Marat/Sade into a film. The weaving of time, space, plot, real-and-imagined characters, sexual liberation, and surrealist imagery made Marat/Sade a sensation. Little did audiences realize that this counterculture classic was written by a German Jew. At that time, Weiss was also at work on a play about Auschwitz: The Investigation. These two dramas are in this volume along with The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman. All are cogently introduced and edited by Robert Cohen.

I Want to Go Home Forever

I Want to Go Home Forever
Author: Loren B Landau
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1776142314

Thirteen true stories about xenophobia and belonging in Johannesburg Generations of people from across Africa, Europe and Asia have turned metal from the depths of the earth into Africa’s wealthiest, most dynamic and most diverse urban centre, a mega-city where post-apartheid South Africa is being made. Yet for newcomers as well as locals, the golden possibilities of Gauteng are tinged with dangers and difficulties. Chichi is a hairdresser from Nigeria who left for South Africa after a love affair went bad. Azam arrived from Pakistan with a modest wad of cash and a dream. Estiphanos trekked the continent escaping political persecution in Ethiopia, only to become the target of the May 2008 xenophobic attacks. Nombuyiselo is the mother of 14-year-old Simphiwe Mahori, shot dead in 2015 by a Somalian shopkeeper in Snake Park, sparking a further wave of anti-foreigner violence. After fighting white oppression for decades, Ntombi has turned her anger towards African foreigners, who, she says are taking jobs away from South Africans and fuelling crime. Papi, a freedom fighter and activist in Katlehong, now dedicates his life to teaching the youth in his community that tolerance is the only way forward. These are some of the thirteen stories that make up this collection. They are the stories of South Africans, some Gauteng-born, others from neighbouring provinces, striving to realise the promises of democracy. They are also the stories of newcomers, from neighbouring countries and from as far afield as Pakistan and Rwanda, seeking a secure future in those very promises. The narratives, collected by researchers, journalists and writers, reflect the many facets of South Africa’s post-apartheid decades. Taken together they give voice to the emotions and relations emanating from a paradoxical place of outrage and hope, violence and solidarity. They speak of intersections between people and their pasts, and of how, in the making of selves and the other they are also shaping South Africa. Underlying these accounts is a nostalgia for an imagined future that can never be realised. These are stories of forever seeking a place called ‘home’.

Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction

Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction
Author: Richard Bellamy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 153
Release: 2008-09-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192802534

Interest in citizenship has never been higher. But what does it mean to be a citizen in a modern, complex community? Richard Bellamy approaches the subject of citizenship from a political perspective and, in clear and accessible language, addresses the complexities behind this highly topical issue.

Arab Berlin

Arab Berlin
Author: Hanan Badr
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3839462630

Berlin is increasingly emerging as a hub of Arab intellectual life in Europe. In this first study of Arab culture to zoom in on the thriving metropolis, the contributors shed light on the dynamics of transformation with Arabs as agents, subjects, and objects of change in the spheres of politics, society and history, gender, demographics and migration, media and culture, and education and research. The kaleidoscopic character of the collection, embracing academic articles, essays, interviews and photos, reflects critical encounters in Berlin. It brings together authors from inter- and multidisciplinary fields and backgrounds and invites the readers into a much-needed conversation on contemporary transformations.

Mediating the South Korean Other

Mediating the South Korean Other
Author: David C. Oh
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472220373

Multiculturalism in Korea formed in the context of its neoliberal, global aspirations, its postcolonial legacy with Japan, and its subordinated neocolonial relationship with the United States. The Korean ethnoscape and mediascape produce a complex understanding of difference that cannot be easily reduced to racism or ethnocentrism. Indeed the Korean word, injongchabyeol, often translated as racism, refers to discrimination based on any kind of “human category.” Explaining Korea’s relationship to difference and its practices of othering, including in media culture, requires new language and nuance in English-language scholarship. This collection brings together leading and emerging scholars of multiculturalism in Korean media culture to examine mediated constructions of the “other,” taking into account the nation’s postcolonial and neocolonial relationships and its mediated construction of self. “Anthrocategorism,” a more nuanced translation of injongchabyeol, is proffered as a new framework for understanding difference in ways that are locally meaningful in a society and media system in which racial or even ethnic differences are not the most salient. The collection points to the construction of racial others that elevates, tolerates, and incorporates difference; the construction of valued and devalued ethnic others; and the ambivalent construction of co-ethnic others as sympathetic victims or marginalized threats.

Refuge in a Moving World

Refuge in a Moving World
Author: Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2020-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1787353176

Refuge in a Moving World draws together more than thirty contributions from multiple disciplines and fields of research and practice to discuss different ways of engaging with, and responding to, migration and displacement. The volume combines critical reflections on the complexities of conceptualizing processes and experiences of (forced) migration, with detailed analyses of these experiences in contemporary and historical settings from around the world. Through interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies – including participatory research, poetic and spatial interventions, ethnography, theatre, discourse analysis and visual methods – the volume documents the complexities of refugees’ and migrants’ journeys. This includes a particular focus on how people inhabit and negotiate everyday life in cities, towns, camps and informal settlements across the Middle East and North Africa, Southern and Eastern Africa, and Europe.

Theater of War and Exile

Theater of War and Exile
Author: Domnica Radulescu
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-06-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476619190

In what ways does political trauma influence the art arising from it? Is there an aesthetic of war and exile in theatrical works that emerge from such experiences? Are there cultural markers defining such works from areas like Eastern Europe and Israel? This book considers these questions in an examination of plays, performances and theater artists that speak from a place of political violence and displacement. The author's critical inquiry covers a variety of theatrical experimentations, including Brechtian distancing, black humor, pastiche, surreal and hyper-real imagery, reversed chronologies and disrupted narratives. Drawing on postmodern theories and performance studies as well as interviews and personal statements from the artists discussed, this study explores the transformative power of the theater arts and their function as catalysts for social change, healing and remembrance.