In arguing for Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies as an example of exile theatre, a categorisation I sha... more In arguing for Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies as an example of exile theatre, a categorisation I shall prove over the course of this thesis, I seek to understand how the playwright’s curation of a specific theatrical experience allows for the audience to glean more into the play’s expression of trauma alongside its written form, as afforded by the formal aspects of dramatic fiction. Mouawadian exilic drama, reflexively aware of its dual simultaneous media as both a read text and an experienced moment of theatre, internalises and exploits the heard, watched and read elements of dramatic fiction as means of traumatic expression. I attempt to understand both the textual and the performed experiences of Incendies as alienating, through an engagement with Bertolt Brecht’s defamiliarisation effect, Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory and Sigmund Freud’s mourning and melancholia as focalising tools. These frameworks help us, as mindful spectators of the play, to appreciate the symbiotic nature of the two mediums which, when in conversation, additionally illuminate the traumatic exilic and displaced experience, especially so when we consider how a playwright represents that which resists representation. Language, whether it be oral or textual, must therefore be understood in a new light and definitionally broadened in the context of what I am calling the Mouawadian expression of trauma. This is the case firstly within the spoken and written word when considered in the framework of the French language. Subsequently, Mouawad undermines and transcends the colonially imposed language through employing forms of dialect, intermixing other languages, and the non-verbal language of theatre, that is, the consideration of staging,
accents, emphasis, volume, sonority and controlled tempo(rality). For example, Incendies forces its francophone audience to grapple with the linguistic dissonance created by the utilisation of the hyper-regional joual, a move that magnifies the play’s distancing effect from its francophone audience, especially when one considers the doubly refracted meaning: once through the medium of the performer, a key tool when translating from page to stage, and then again through ourselves – never letting us truly interact with the play’s trauma at its source. A traumatic silence from this loss in transmission, as a result of the play’s double refraction and thus distorsion, then emerges from the genre of exile theatre itself, in intending Incendies to be watched and read (the original play being staged by Mouawad himself in March 2003 before its manuscript was published later that May), the staged production necessarily internalises the gains and losses from this formal transposition of verbalising words in theatre – the reverse case for Incendies’ textual form I will also prove. Mouawadian exilic theatre therefore finds an avenue for traumatic expression through a negotiation of the relationship between performer-reader-audience, consciously crafting the theatrical experience with considerations of delivery – that is, delivering the auditory and visual information in a manner that demands for an equally rapid (or delayed) reception on the attentive audience’s part to effectively communicate meaning.
Keywords: exilic trauma, internal displacement, silence, exile theatre, Iser, unspeakability, representation, différance, defamiliarisation, Freud, absence, melancholia, languages, visuals, Oedipus, odyssey
London School of Economics and Political Science, 2023
This discursive dissertation takes particular interest in the state’s invention and development o... more This discursive dissertation takes particular interest in the state’s invention and development of a refugee figure, a political instrument here read as an intervening space through which we may perceive its political function within the UK’s state legitimation programme. I analyse the UK’s growingly securitised anti-migrant logic in its politico-legal discourse to study the construction of the refugee figure in the UK’s imaginary – as an ‘all-embracing’ Other category induced by and for political reasons, totalising into an erroneous synonymity the refugee, immigrant, migrant, and asylum seeker. A self-reinforcing composite of legal and political forces in the UK, inflected by xenophobia, produces and maintains the ‘necessary’ legal category of the refugee as a productive enemy to serve political ends in ways that legitimise the necessity of the state. Reading the UK’s hostile environment as a state of exception that generates the migrant ‘crisis’, I argue that the UK relegates certain racialised bodies, packaged as refugees, to a categorial camp – itself a state of exception – and supplies them as politically expedient and productive enemies in its state legitimation programme.
In arguing for Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies as an example of exile theatre, a categorisation I sha... more In arguing for Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies as an example of exile theatre, a categorisation I shall prove over the course of this thesis, I seek to understand how the playwright’s curation of a specific theatrical experience allows for the audience to glean more into the play’s expression of trauma alongside its written form, as afforded by the formal aspects of dramatic fiction. Mouawadian exilic drama, reflexively aware of its dual simultaneous media as both a read text and an experienced moment of theatre, internalises and exploits the heard, watched and read elements of dramatic fiction as means of traumatic expression. I attempt to understand both the textual and the performed experiences of Incendies as alienating, through an engagement with Bertolt Brecht’s defamiliarisation effect, Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory and Sigmund Freud’s mourning and melancholia as focalising tools. These frameworks help us, as mindful spectators of the play, to appreciate the symbiotic nature of the two mediums which, when in conversation, additionally illuminate the traumatic exilic and displaced experience, especially so when we consider how a playwright represents that which resists representation. Language, whether it be oral or textual, must therefore be understood in a new light and definitionally broadened in the context of what I am calling the Mouawadian expression of trauma. This is the case firstly within the spoken and written word when considered in the framework of the French language. Subsequently, Mouawad undermines and transcends the colonially imposed language through employing forms of dialect, intermixing other languages, and the non-verbal language of theatre, that is, the consideration of staging,
accents, emphasis, volume, sonority and controlled tempo(rality). For example, Incendies forces its francophone audience to grapple with the linguistic dissonance created by the utilisation of the hyper-regional joual, a move that magnifies the play’s distancing effect from its francophone audience, especially when one considers the doubly refracted meaning: once through the medium of the performer, a key tool when translating from page to stage, and then again through ourselves – never letting us truly interact with the play’s trauma at its source. A traumatic silence from this loss in transmission, as a result of the play’s double refraction and thus distorsion, then emerges from the genre of exile theatre itself, in intending Incendies to be watched and read (the original play being staged by Mouawad himself in March 2003 before its manuscript was published later that May), the staged production necessarily internalises the gains and losses from this formal transposition of verbalising words in theatre – the reverse case for Incendies’ textual form I will also prove. Mouawadian exilic theatre therefore finds an avenue for traumatic expression through a negotiation of the relationship between performer-reader-audience, consciously crafting the theatrical experience with considerations of delivery – that is, delivering the auditory and visual information in a manner that demands for an equally rapid (or delayed) reception on the attentive audience’s part to effectively communicate meaning.
Keywords: exilic trauma, internal displacement, silence, exile theatre, Iser, unspeakability, representation, différance, defamiliarisation, Freud, absence, melancholia, languages, visuals, Oedipus, odyssey
London School of Economics and Political Science, 2023
This discursive dissertation takes particular interest in the state’s invention and development o... more This discursive dissertation takes particular interest in the state’s invention and development of a refugee figure, a political instrument here read as an intervening space through which we may perceive its political function within the UK’s state legitimation programme. I analyse the UK’s growingly securitised anti-migrant logic in its politico-legal discourse to study the construction of the refugee figure in the UK’s imaginary – as an ‘all-embracing’ Other category induced by and for political reasons, totalising into an erroneous synonymity the refugee, immigrant, migrant, and asylum seeker. A self-reinforcing composite of legal and political forces in the UK, inflected by xenophobia, produces and maintains the ‘necessary’ legal category of the refugee as a productive enemy to serve political ends in ways that legitimise the necessity of the state. Reading the UK’s hostile environment as a state of exception that generates the migrant ‘crisis’, I argue that the UK relegates certain racialised bodies, packaged as refugees, to a categorial camp – itself a state of exception – and supplies them as politically expedient and productive enemies in its state legitimation programme.
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accents, emphasis, volume, sonority and controlled tempo(rality). For example, Incendies forces its francophone audience to grapple with the linguistic dissonance created by the utilisation of the hyper-regional joual, a move that magnifies the play’s distancing effect from its francophone audience, especially when one considers the doubly refracted meaning: once through the medium of the performer, a key tool when translating from page to stage, and then again through ourselves – never letting us truly interact with the play’s trauma at its source. A traumatic silence from this loss in transmission, as a result of the play’s double refraction and thus distorsion, then emerges from the genre of exile theatre itself, in intending Incendies to be watched and read (the original play being staged by Mouawad himself in March 2003 before its manuscript was published later that May), the staged production necessarily internalises the gains and losses from this formal transposition of verbalising words in theatre – the reverse case for Incendies’ textual form I will also prove. Mouawadian exilic theatre therefore finds an avenue for traumatic expression through a negotiation of the relationship between performer-reader-audience, consciously crafting the theatrical experience with considerations of delivery – that is, delivering the auditory and visual information in a manner that demands for an equally rapid (or delayed) reception on the attentive audience’s part to effectively communicate meaning.
Keywords: exilic trauma, internal displacement, silence, exile theatre, Iser, unspeakability, representation, différance, defamiliarisation, Freud, absence, melancholia, languages, visuals, Oedipus, odyssey
accents, emphasis, volume, sonority and controlled tempo(rality). For example, Incendies forces its francophone audience to grapple with the linguistic dissonance created by the utilisation of the hyper-regional joual, a move that magnifies the play’s distancing effect from its francophone audience, especially when one considers the doubly refracted meaning: once through the medium of the performer, a key tool when translating from page to stage, and then again through ourselves – never letting us truly interact with the play’s trauma at its source. A traumatic silence from this loss in transmission, as a result of the play’s double refraction and thus distorsion, then emerges from the genre of exile theatre itself, in intending Incendies to be watched and read (the original play being staged by Mouawad himself in March 2003 before its manuscript was published later that May), the staged production necessarily internalises the gains and losses from this formal transposition of verbalising words in theatre – the reverse case for Incendies’ textual form I will also prove. Mouawadian exilic theatre therefore finds an avenue for traumatic expression through a negotiation of the relationship between performer-reader-audience, consciously crafting the theatrical experience with considerations of delivery – that is, delivering the auditory and visual information in a manner that demands for an equally rapid (or delayed) reception on the attentive audience’s part to effectively communicate meaning.
Keywords: exilic trauma, internal displacement, silence, exile theatre, Iser, unspeakability, representation, différance, defamiliarisation, Freud, absence, melancholia, languages, visuals, Oedipus, odyssey