Abstract
Abstract This chapter discusses the aesthetics and ethics of staging exile and migration as one of the focus points in the political theater of today. It argues that political theater has the power to engage with the strategies of critical countermapping of migration. Using affect, immersion, and embodiment, it can rehumanize migrants, the underclass, and national abjects. It can also stage the uniqueness of individual journeys within the impersonality of the global movements. Political theater can give voice to an asylum seeker and can return dignity to a victim. Telling stories about migration and confronting the bodies of the performers-refugees with the bodies of the spectators–their hosts, it can turn a nameless migrant into a proper individual, someone who possesses their personal history, memory, agency, and identity. Bringing stories of migration to the homes of those people who practice mixophobia, political theater can make the stranger relatable. The play The Jungle (2017), written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for the Good Chance Theatre, and presented by the National Theatre and the Young Vic in London, serves this chapter as its primary example of how political theater can educate its audiences about the other and help them realize that this other is already within us.
Published Version
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