Performing Migrancy And Mobility In Africa

Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa focuses on a body of performance work, the work of Magnet Theatre in particular but also work by other artists in Cape Town and other parts of the continent or the world, that engages with the Cape as a real or imagined node in a complex system of migration and mobility. Located at the foot of the African continent, lodged between two oceans at the intersection of many of the earth's major shipping lanes, Cape Town is a stage for a powerful mixing of cultures and peoples and has been an important node in a network of flows, circuits of movement and exchange. The performance works studied here attempt to get to grips with what it feels like to be on the move and in the spaces in-between that characterises the lives, now and for centuries before, of multiple peoples who move around and pass through places like the Cape. The contributors are a broad range of mostly African authors from various parts of the continent and as such the book offers an insight into new thinking and new approaches from an emerging and important location.

Human mobility has long played a foundational role in producing state territories, resources, and hierarchies. When people move within and across national boundaries, they create both challenges and opportunities. In Mobility Makes States, chapters written by historians, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists explore different patterns of mobility in sub-Saharan Africa and how African states have sought to harness these movements toward their own ends. While border control and intercontinental migration policies remain important topics of study, Mobility Makes States demonstrates that immigration control is best understood alongside parallel efforts by states in Africa to promote both long-distance and everyday movements. The contributors challenge the image of a fixed and static state that is concerned only with stopping foreign migrants at its border, and show that the politics of mobility takes place across a wide range of locations, including colonial hinterlands, workplaces, camps, foreign countries, and city streets. They examine short-term and circular migrations, everyday commuting and urban expansion, forced migrations, emigrations, diasporic communities, and the mobility of gatekeepers and officers of the state who push and pull migrant populations in different directions. Through the experiences and trajectories of migration in sub-Saharan Africa, this empirically rich volume sheds new light on larger global patterns and state making processes. Contributors: Eric Allina, Oliver Bakewell, Pamila Gupta, Nauja Kleist, Loren B. Landau, Joel Quirk, Benedetta Rossi, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Simon Turner, Darshan Vigneswaran.

This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussions of migrant integration globally with innovative, interdisciplinary perspectives focused on migration within Africa. It sheds new light on how human mobility redefines the meaning of home, community, citizenship and belonging. The authors ask how people’s movements within the continent are forging novel forms of membership while catalysing social change within the communities and countries to which they move and which they have left behind. Original case studies from across Africa question the concepts, actors, and social trajectories dominant in the contemporary literature. Moreover, it speaks to and challenges sociological debates over the nature of migrant integration, debates largely shaped by research in the world’s wealthy regions. The text, in part or as a whole, will appeal to students and scholars of migration, development, urban and rural transformation, African studies and displacement.

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that delves beneath the media headlines about the “migration crisis”, Brexit, Trump and similar events and spectacles that have been linked to the intensification and proliferation of stereotypes about migrants since 2015. Topics include the representations of migration and stereotypes in citizenship ceremonies and culinary traditions, law and literature, and public history and performance. Bringing together academics in the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as artists and theatre practitioners, the collection equips readers with new methodologies, keywords and collaborative research tools to support critical inquiry and public-facing research in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Cultural and Migration Studies, and Applied Theatre and History.

This book offers a unique Australian perspective on the global crisis in refugee protection. Using performance as both an object and a lens, this volume explores the politics and aesthetics of migration control, border security and refugee resistance. The first half of the book, titled On Stage, examines performance objects such as verbatim and documentary plays, children’s theatre, immersive performance, slam poetry, video art and feature films. Specifically, it considers how refugees, and their artistic collaborators, assert their individuality, agency and authority as well as their resistance to cruel policies like offshore processing through performance. The second half of the book, titled Off Stage, employs performance as a lens to analyse the wider field of refugee politics, including the relationship between forced migrants and the forced displacement of First Nations peoples that underpins the settler-colonial state, philosophies of cosmopolitanism, the role of the canon in art history and the spectacle of bordering practices. In doing so, it illuminates the strategic performativity—and nonperformativity—of the law, philosophy, the state and the academy more broadly in the exclusion and control of refugees. Taken together, the chapters in this volume draw on, and contribute to, a wide range of disciplines including theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, border studies and forced migration studies, and will be of great interest to students and scholars in all four fields.

This volume investigates the rise of human rights discourses manifested in the global spectrum of theatre and performance since 1945. Essays address topics such as disability, discrimination indigenous rights, torture, gender violence, genocide and elder abuse.

This book explores the intersections of gender, religion and migration within the context of post-independent Zimbabwe, with a specific focus on how gender disparities impact economic development. By demonstrating how these interconnections impact women’s and girls’ lived realities, the book addresses the need for gender equity, gender inclusion and gender mainstreaming in both religious and societal institutions. This book assesses the gender and migration nexus in Zimbabwe and examines the impact of religio-cultural ideologies on the status of women. In doing so, it assesses the transition of Zimbabwean women across spaces and provides insights into the practical strategies that can be utilised to improve their status both “at home” and “on the move.” Furthermore, chapters show how space continues to be genderised in ways that perpetuate structural inequality to challenge the exclusion of women from key social processes. Contributing to ongoing scholarly debates on gender in Africa, this book will be of interest to academics and students of Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, African Studies, Development Studies as well as advocators of human rights and gender activists.

After the end of Apartheid, South African theatre was characterized by a remarkable process of constant aesthetic reinvention. This multivocal volume documents some of the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these innovative stage idioms.