Abstract
This chapter uses Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s rich interchange, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), to rethink the ethical encounter in debbie tucker green’s dirty butterfly (2003) and hang (2015). In a divergence from a scholarly consensus that interprets the drama as providing edifying ethical experiences, the authors instead suggest that tucker green’s plays withhold a straightforward ethical encounter and make such a withholding a key way through which the political power of the play is expressed. There is a dialectical movement between the discursive mediation of violent dispossession and victim-protagonists whose self-possession is (always) in question, a process that invites audiences to think/feel the violence of this negation. This withholding of resolution creates, they argue, an aggressive but energizing demand for a different form of relationality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Angelaki, Vicky (2017) Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis (London and New York: Bloomsbury).
Aragay, Mireia and Enric Monforte (2013) ‘Racial Violence, Witnessing and Emancipated Spectatorship in The Colour of Justice, Fallout and random’, in Vicky Angelaki (ed) Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave), pp. 96–120.
Aston, Elaine (2011) ‘debbie tucker green’, in Martin Middeke, P.P. Schnierer, and A. Sierz (eds) The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights (London: Methuen Drama), pp. 183–202.
Avramopoulou, Eirini (2014) ‘Crisis, Critique and the Possibilities of the Political: Eirini Avramopoulou interviews Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou apropos the publication of their book Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013)’, The Cyprus Review 26(1, Spring): 195–203.
Baker, W. Oliver (2017) ‘Democracy, Class, and White Settler Colonialism’, Public 28(55, June): 144–153.
Billington, Michael (2015) ‘Review of Debbie Tucker Green, Hang’, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jun/17/hang-review-marianne-jean-baptistejustice-capital-punishment.
Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou (2013) Dispossession: The Performance in the Political (Cambridge: Polity).
Delgado-García, Cristina (2015) Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics, Subjectivity (Berlin: De Gruyter).
Fragkou, Marissia (2012) ‘Precarious Subjects: Ethics and Witnessing and Responsibility in the Plays of debbie tucker green’, Performing Ethos 3(1): 23–39.
Fragkou, Marissia and Lynette Goddard (2013) ‘Acting In/Action: Staging Human Rights in debbie tucker green’s Royal Court Plays’, in Vicky Angelaki (ed) Contemporary British Theatre: Breaking New Ground (Basingstoke: Palgrave), pp. 145–166.
Frazer, Nancy (2000) ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review 3(May/June): 107–120.
Goddard, Lynette (2013) ‘debbie tucker green’, in Dan Rebellato (ed) Modern British Playwriting 2000–2009 (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 190–212.
Horanyi, Rita (2014) ‘Review of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Feminism & Psychology 24(4): 557–559.
Inchley, Maggie (2015) Voice and New Writing, 1997–2007: Articulating the Demos (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
Little, Ruth (2005) ‘Post-show Discussion After debbie tucker green, stoning mary’, audio recording, British Library.
Morrill, Angie, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Collective (2016) ‘Before Dispossession, or Surviving It’, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 12(1): 1–20.
Peacock, D. Keith (2008) ‘Black British Drama and the Politics of Identity’, in Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (eds), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (Oxford: Wiley), pp. 48–65.
Puwar, Nirmal (2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (Oxford: Berg).
Riedelsheimer, Martin and Korbinian Stöckl (2017) ‘The Mobility of Suffering: Cosmopolitan Ethics in debbie tucker green’s Plays’, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 5(1): 112–125.
Sabsay, Leticia (2016) ‘Dispossession: The Performative in the Political’, Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 23(10): 1513–1515.
Skeggs, Beverley (2004) Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge).
Taylor, Charles (1992) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
tucker green, debbie (2003) dirty butterfly (London: Nick Hern).
tucker green, debbie (2005) stoning mary (London: Nick Hern).
tucker green, debbie (2015) hang (London: Nick Hern).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Adiseshiah, S., Bolton, J. (2020). debbie tucker green and (the Dialectics of) Dispossession: Reframing the Ethical Encounter. In: Adiseshiah, S., Bolton, J. (eds) debbie tucker green. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34581-5_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34581-5_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34580-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34581-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)