Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Efficacy

Abstract

In their attempts to conceptualize non-elitist versions of transnational belonging and political community that are not bound by Western privilege or the capitalist ideologies of globalization, some proponents of new cosmopolitanism have taken pains to position forced migrants and refugees as potential — and even exemplary — cosmopolitan subjects. These deterritorialized (non-)citizens are thus seen to participate in the uneven affiliations and ‘discrepant’ cultural engagements of mobile communities (Clifford, 1992), the survivalist, Vernacular’ cultural translations of postcolonial societies (Bhabha, 2000) and the practical, ‘actually existing’ cosmopolitanisms of situated collectivities (Malcomson, 1998). In such inclusive formulations, refugees and forced migrants share with other globally mobile subjects the propensity for cosmopolitan ‘thinking and feeling’ and the ability to negotiate new sociocultural and political attachments. What is taken for granted in this discourse is that refugees and forced migrants are necessarily accorded the ancient right of universal hospitality that underpins Kantian cosmopolitanism, ‘the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he [sic] arrives on someone else’s territory’ (Kant, 1970: 105). While this right is enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees and respected in many regions, refugees and asylum seekers are all too often divested of political status, targeted for exclusion/expulsion from specific sovereign territories and/or forced to live in camps or liminal zones where the conditions of existence are reduced to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben terms ‘bare life’ (life exposed to death) (1998).

We are the innocents who have kissed the noose of Australian Democracy.

(Mohsen Soltany-Zand, 2002: 10)