Title: Performances of Border: Theatre and the borders of Germany, 1980-2015
Abstract: Introduction-At the center of my research is the idea that a concept of border is specific to a place and history. I ask how this concept is represented on stage, and what the role of performance is in creating and maintaining such a concept. To investigate these questions, I examine key moments when borders and boundaries became the center of political discourse in post-war Germany.
The border is an especially powerful political symbol, and everyday performances of borders that imply their enforcement or diminution are central tropes in contemporary politics. Such performances can be discursive or non-discursive— they can range from statements to the building of walls or troop deployment. The border is also the locus where fields of meaning concentrate: social and political ideas of belonging, citizenship, sovereignty, immigration, and ideas of difference – racial, ethnic, cultural, political. The political reality and its necessities activate configurations of these associative fields that are fitting for it. A concept of border marries a specific constellation of meaning, an organization of these associative fields, with a temporal question. It activates histories and referenced, such as the history of the Berlin wall, and conjures potential futures – of a Fortress Europe or a Europe Without Borders. Such a concept of border appears to us in social practices, public discourse and aesthetic creation, and at the same time it is constituted (and changing) through such practices. It is a constellation of images, practices, and linguistic articulations, sometime competing and contradictory but nonetheless enmeshed within constraining terms for their intelligibility.
Part I-
I examine the work of the Turkish Ensemble (TE), focusing on their original work. I read it within the context of the rise of culture as a perspective on migration integration, kindled by progressive movement in the late 1970s that aimed to address guestworkers beyond labor/economic context. I argue that we see the emergence of multiculturalism, not as a specific set of practices or attitude towards minorities, but a discursive field that focuses on culture as the primary point of interface between ‘local’ and ‘foreign’. I argue that although initially intended to expand and humanize the understanding of minorities, the insistence on the perspective of culture quickly turns towards different kinds of cultural essentialism and ethno-national articulations of cultural difference.
In the work of TE, I compare and analyze the first (un-staged) project with the production that premiered in 1980. I show how the focus shifts from a labor perspective that includes concerns shared between immigrant communities (international immigrant labor concerns and generational differences), towards an ethno-national representation of ‘authentic’ Turkish culture. I continue to discuss the development of a children’s theatre repertoire as a translation project, where Turkish artistic and cultural practices (such as the circumcision) are mediated to German and 2nd…
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-11-01
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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