Migration in Performance : Crossing the Colonial Present

This book explores the use of creative practices, in particular, theatre, as a platform for enabling new research methodologies and spaces in which to practice politics. It offers insights into the use of theatre as a medium to disseminate research to the wider public and extend the terrain of political debate in productive ways. The book explores debates within transnational feminism and transnational justice to offer new perspectives on affect and performance. It also engages with theory on the liveliness of material objects as actors in networks of knowledge production. In particular, the book provides an insight into the travels of a performance script through national and transnational space, as an opportunity to consider a public debate across nations that have intertwined histories and spatialities on the issues of care and need.

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children, the elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples.

This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.