This page is a discussion forum for the National Identities/National Cultures Research Group for our dual session at the 2008 conference of the American Society for Theatre Research. Enjoy! Evan

THE NATIONAL IDENTITIES/NATIONAL CULTURES RESEARCH GROUP

Since our first meeting in 2002, the National Identities & National Cultures Working Group has foregrounded this year's conference themes of "migration map and memory" with a range of projects addressing the complexities and contradictions of theatrical nationalism in numerous national contexts. In 2005, Kiki Gounaridou edited a collection of essays by group members: Staging Nationalism: Essays on Theatre and National Identity. Following the 2006 hiatus in ASTR working groups, we re-convened at the 2007 conference with a two-hour seminar in which 17 papers were discussed. For the 2008 conference, sixteen participants will be addressing our perennial themes in relation to theories of drama, theatre and performance as they migrate across national borders. For this year's dual session, we invited studies of theory produced within glocal or syncretic contexts that have been shaped through importation of "foreign" dramatic theory, including articulations of local versions of foreign dramatic aesthetics, attempts to recover or modernize pre-colonial aesthetics, and radical statements attempting to move beyond both imported and local traditions.

NI/NC Working Group.

First Session (Moderator: Evan Darwin Winet)

Dennis C. Beck (James Madison University), "Gray Zone Theatre Dissidence: Rethinking Revolution through the Enactment of Civil Society"

The Soviet-led Warsaw Pact tanks that invaded Czechoslovakia in August of 1968 to offer "fraternal assistance" and crush the liberalizing advances of the Prague Spring signaled a change in government from Czech-led reform communism to Soviet-directed neo-Stalinism. Their meaning echoed across the Soviet Bloc, for under them hopes for an "enlightened" communism died. As the space for potential change shifted from internal to external of the party, so too did the conceptual energy of the "dissidents" redirect from reform to revolution. Skeptical of violent revolution after the Russian example, dissidents retheorized revolution into the function of a parallel polis, second culture, or realm of independent activity that would create space for "living in truth," social solidarity, exchange of ideas, and "antipolitical" politics. Concurrently a new generation of theatres emerged. Although their consonant approaches inspired categorization as authorial theatres, no theory yet clarifies what united their work or explains how they assumed the function of theatres-of-the-nation and were able to play a pivotal role in 1989's "Velvet" Revolution, then experienced as a national liberation. Not only did they express or embody concepts attributed to the dissidents (living in truth, personal responsibility, small-scale work, antipolitics, civil society, new evolutionism, etc.) but often anticipated them. They synthesized these with native as well as foreign influences (Artaud, Living Theatre, etc.) In authorial theatres, dissenting ideas were provisionally put into practice and Czechs experienced their effects. The public nature of their art, however, required that they operate within the "gray zone," where they could affect many people yet were accountable to the regime. Exploring connections between authorial dramaturgy, dissident ideas, and "imported" concepts yields a theory of theatre's possible means of mitigating or overcoming oppressive conditions.

James Hesla (University of Maryland), "The 'Other' Avant-Garde: Teater Garasi and Experimental Theatre in Indonesia"

In the wake of the Asian economic crisis, the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, and the resignation of President Suharto, the Yogyakarta-based Teater Garasi (Garage Theatre) expressed the sense of alienation and chaos many Indonesians experienced through Waktu Batu (literally 'Stone Time'). Waktu Batu freely adapts ancient narratives combined with a pastiche of images from contemporary life. The result is a hybrid
performance that synthesizes western and Indonesian theatrical aesthetics, posing the question: how can Indonesians reconcile an increasingly globalized world with traditional notions of self, rooted in a monolithic Javanese cultural history? Teater Garasi has presented Waktu Batu at arts festivals at local and international arts festivals and has invited international artists to explore alternative approaches to performance. What are the implications of this interdisciplinary fusion of traditional and non-Indonesian performance aesthetics? As Teater Garasi looks outside the archipelago for artistic inspiration, to what extent is Waktu Batu a reflection of changing cultural identityas Indonesian artists navigate the globalized world?

Kyounghye Kwon (Ohio State University), "Glocality and Glocalocality: Postcolonial Absurdism/Absurdist Postcolonialism in South Korean Theatre"

What is it about Korea that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is the most frequently staged play in Korean theatre history, and the absurdists Beckett, Pinter, and Ionesco are among the top twelve Western playwrights whose works have been staged the most? And why is it that some Korean scholars go as far as to say that almost all South Korean plays in the 60s and onwards have been more or less influenced by the Theatre of the Absurd, and that absurdist theatre can be regarded as a short cut to understanding Korean contemporary theatre? Starting with the 1960 production of Eugène Ionesco's La Leçon (The Lesson) (1951) by a new Korean theatre group, Silhumkukjang (Experimental Theatre), numerous new small theatre groups in Korea in the 60s and 70s staged Western existentialist and absurdist plays. And Korean director Young-ung Im, whose production was lauded by theatre scholar Martin Esslin, has been staging Beckett's Waiting for Godot almost annually for about forty years.

Korean postcolonial theatre, which emerged in the 50s and 60s, historically converges with the Theatre of the Absurd. The two theatres' historical convergence, I argue, has begotten unique and significant global and local aesthetic interpenetration in Korean postcolonial theatre, a relatively young theatre from the perspective of the Western concept of theatre, and a theatre that has been subject to much less international scholarly scrutiny than Western absurdist theatre. When a Western aesthetic migrates to another cultural domain, it is bound to make some adjustments, alterations, different emphases, and unexpected additions. In this essay, I will treat Korean theatre's fascination with absurdist theatre not as a West-centered evaluative phenomenon, but as a significant glocal (interpenetration of global and local) aesthetic phenomenon. Employing the emerging transnational lens of glocality, I will analyze Joyeol Park and Taesok Oh's absurdist plays. In so doing, I will address a specific mode of glocality, which I call "glocalocality."


Diana Manole (University of Toronto), "Post-Colonial Pride and Prejudices: Redefining Otherness in English-Canadian and Romanian dramas"

In the post-colonial and post-modern world, the nation-space establishes itself as "a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural differences" (Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 212). Consequently, essentialist identities of "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson) become gradually obsolete as "the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of 'other' people. It becomes a question of otherness of the people-as-one" (Bhabha 215, my emphasis). In this context, the transition from a political regime to another one aggravates the shift in national identity, mainly through the ever-increasing gap between "the continuous, accumulative process of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative" (Bhabha 204). Eventually, the individual starts acting as the Other to everybody else, including him/herself.

Reading Bhabha's concepts against other theories of post-colonialism and post-communism, this paper explores the redefinitions of self and otherness in two non-traditional works: English-Canadian Ronnie Burkett's puppet theatre play Street of Blood and Romanian Alina Mungiu-Pippidi's movie script The Death of Ariel. The two texts, both written in the same period, 1998 and 1995 respectively, express their authors' political attitudes and share surprising common traits in spite of the economical, political, and cultural differences between the two countries. Most striking is that both playwrights choose the tragicomic re-enactment of homophobia as the main strategy of depicting alienating stereotypes and continuous re-definitions of collective value scales. Mirroring each other, the two plays reveal some interesting common denominators of post-colonialism and post-communism.

Laurie Frederik Meer (University of Maryland), "Dramatic Irony and Janus-Faced Nationalism in Cuba"

One enduring issue in contemporary Cuba has been the question of what is authentically Cuban in a society increasingly affected by consumerism and global cultural trends. What was once the promoted image of the progressive Hombre Nuevo (New Socialist Man) has now become an Hombre Viejo (Old Man), symbolizing a dying past, old legends, and dead heroes. No longer able to rely on keywords such as "sacrifice" and "struggle" or to rouse support through references to Marx or Lenin, state propaganda-assisted by state supported artists- turned to cultural heritage. Rural theatre companies were funded in record numbers and a new cultural crusade was mobilized to rescue "pure" Cubania from contamination of capitalist "pseudo-culture." The dramatic irony of Cuba's situation is revealed in light of the growing tourist industry that drives the economy. Popular discourses lament the contamination of traditional Cubanía and the corruption of memory, yet loyal theatre practitioners who once embraced the idyllic philosophies of the Revolution now defect to capitalist countries.

In the midst of this battle between old and new, real and pseudo, there is a distinct difference in how Cuban identity is being marketed on the national as opposed to international level. The government double-plays this identity by simultaneously promoting and condemning pseudo-culture. This paper looks at how the creative process is interwoven with political structure and socialist ideology, and questions how national images and definitions of cultural authenticity are manipulated and maintained in popular consciousness during a time of crisis and change.

Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento (Wesleyan University), "Cannibalizing The Canon: Brazilian Post-Dictatorship Theatre"

Latin American group theatre has long stood as a catalyst for political resistance and the remapping of national cultural identity. Director Enrique Diaz, of Rio de Janeiro's Cia. dos Atores, demonstrates that a Brazilian aesthetic is not bound to intracultural research; rather, it may productively appropriate foreign influence to simultaneously reflect the nation's position in local and global levels.

Diaz finds great inspiration in Brazilian Modernist Oswald de Andrade's 1928 "Cannibalist Manifesto"-a call to "eat" and digest, and thus transform, foreign and national influences to bring the nation past its subaltern cultural position as a former Portuguese colony. Rehearsal: Hamlet deconstructs Shakespeare's tragedy to question state power and individual agency, while The Sea Gull Play appropriates Chekhov's text to revisit the very notion of art. These pieces politically intervene on the spectator's perception of "high art": actors challenge the texts by inserting commentary, rehearsal moments, pop culture, and multimedia. Diaz's "Cannibalism" creates national dramaturgy not by promoting a revival of past genres, but by elaborating "new visions for [these genres'] codes, the understanding of what they served, how they were, and offer contemporary translations of their processes" (Guzik "A Cia dos Atores").

Lisa Peschel (University of Minnesota), "The Performance of Czech Leftist National Identity in the Terezín Ghetto in the Testimony of Czech-Jewish Survivors"

In my paper I explore theories of drama developed by the practitioners themselves regarding an unusual form of syncretism: the performance of leftist nationalism by young Czech Jews in the Theresienstadt/Terezín ghetto.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century Czech-language theater functioned as a surrogate political arena for national arguments, but after the Czechoslovak state was established in 1918 it opened up to a wide variety of international trends. In the late 1930s progressive Czech theaters returned to the performance of national identity but with a distinctly left-wing slant. As the rise of Nazism threatened the existence of the state, "Czechness" was performed, often by combining folk and traditional characters with the most avant-garde staging techniques, as the embodiment of all virtues opposed to the forces these artists perceived as the roots of fascism: militarism and capitalism. When young Czech Jews who had been involved in leftist theater groups were deported, they continued this performance practice during permitted cultural activities in the ghetto.

Based on their post-war testimony I argue that, during the radical shifts in Czechoslovak national and political identity from 1945 until today, their own theories regarding the significance of performance in the ghetto have functioned as a "site of glocal negotiation." I trace the changes in their discourse from 1960s efforts to explain the performances of leftist nationalism to their Czech socialist peers, through 1990s attempts to place their narrative within international discussions of the Holocaust, to their 2004-05 efforts to interpret this phenomenon to an American theater historian.

Melissa Rynn Porterfield (University of Pittsburgh), "The Crystallization of Noh Theatre: Constructing National Memory by Standardizing Body Memory"

From its origins in harvest rituals, to its recognition as a national heritage in the years following WWII, Noh has always been an embodied manifestation of national, cultural and religious identity. Virtually unchanged for centuries, Noh has provided a national history for both performer and audience, memorializing political and religious systems, historical events, music and fashion. This paper examines Noh's revivals during the Meiji period and the American occupation of Japan following WWII, and the National Treasures Act of 1950, as moments in which the theatrical and performance traditions of Noh have been harnessed in an attempt to recover a kind of "pre-colonial" national identity for Japan.

Theoretically, the paper utilizes the work of historian Pierre Nora who asserts that, in the construction of national history, cultural practices gradually move from existing in an intention-free cultural continuum (le milieux de mémoire), towards a crystallization of discrete moments, (les lieux de mémoire), frozen in time and co-opted in the construction of a larger national narrative. In this paper, I will trace the transition of Noh from its beginnings an example of a milieux de mémoire, to its transformation towards lieu de mémoire during the Meiji period. Additionally, I employ phenomenologist Edward S. Casey's work on "body memory" to assert that there exists a difference in this rate of transformation between the theatrical and performance (actor) traditions of Noh, and that because of the particular nature of "body memory" utilized in the transmission of the performance tradition, its transition towards lieu de mémoire has been slowed, culminating in the National Treasures Act of 1950.

Shannon Rose Riley (San Jose State University), "Migrations across the Windward Passage: The Practice of Haitian Diaspora in/against Cuban National Performance"

Since the late 18th century, there have been three massive waves of Haitian migration across the Windward Passage into Cuba-for example, during the US occupation of Haiti (1915-34), more than 250,000 black Haitians migrated to Cuba to work for US sugar companies. Fernando Ortiz and others have already acknowledged a significant Haitian influence on Cuban national music forms; it is accepted that Ortiz's theory of transculturation was essential to the emergence of Cuban nationalism and articulated Cuban "national" identity as a complex process involving many races and cultures. However, less attention has been paid to Haitian forms in Cuba that resist, to some degree, the process of transculturation and associations with Cuban national identity.

With a nod to the impacts of Haitian migration on Cuban "national" culture, this paper will analyze performance in Cuba that continues to be identified as Haitian, such as work by the folklore ensemble Guilermon Moncada; the ballet folclórico, Cutumba; Grupo Vocal Desandann (Kreyol for "descendants"); and Grupo Okay. Some groups perform both Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian forms, e.g. Cutumba's repertoire includes Haitian gagá, vodún, and merengue-haitiano as well as Afro-Cuban santería, rumba, and son. Others, like the grupo folclórico, Mystère du Voudu d'Haïti, specialize in Haitian rara. Rara in Cuba is a localized version of a form that has a particular cultural-political function in Haiti. In Cuba, the form has been "folklorized" and largely taken out of public political contexts, even as its practitioners attempt to reconcile the contradictory, signifying frameworks of two different national contexts.

This paper is thus an exploration of tensions between Cuban and Haitian cultural nationalisms and the maintenance of "sub-national" particularities by Haitians in Cuba. Given the acknowledgement of the Haitian influence on Cuban "national" dance and music, why do some performance groups resist national integration and maintain a "Haitian" identity? What is the role of race in these national and sub-national positions? What is at stake in this identity within the context of revolutionary Cuban nationalism? And what are we to make of the fact that the Cuban state pays for both "national" folklore and the Haitian groups?

Camilla Stevens (Rutgers University), "Performing Transnationalism: Theater of the Dominican Diaspora"

My project investigates how Dominican theater performs transnationalism. Since the 1990s, Dominican playwrights and performers have produced a diverse body of performance texts addressing the constant circulation of people, capital, and culture between the North and the South. I propose that rather than linking this work to US Latino theater or locating it in the Dominican national tradition, we adopt a transnational lens for analyzing this cultural production. Transnationalism, according to one succinct definition, constitutes "a process by which migrants, through their daily life activities and social, economic, and political relations, create social fields that cross national boundaries" (Basch, Glick Schiller, Szanton Blanc 22). The authors and performers I study are "transmigrant" theater practitioners, for their creative process and vision is embedded in a field of relationships that simultaneously links them to two nation-states. Many live and work in the New York City area, but they consistently return to the Dominican Republic to publish and premiere their work, and to collaborate with artists on the island. Studies of Dominican transnationalism show a pattern of transmigrants using the host nation-state as a resource while maintaining an emotive and cultural connection with the home country. Like the characters in their plays who are engaged in claiming and being claimed by two nation-states, these authors are in constant negotiation with the discourses of identity in both locations. This is an uncomfortable position that nevertheless affords them simultaneous access to the identity discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality in different cultures, which in turn informs how they articulate their concepts of self and society and opens up reductionist models of national identity. Having established the practice and content of this theater as transnational, the next step in this project is to identify and theorize the aesthetics of Dominican transnational theater.

Second Session (Moderator: Patricia Gaborik)

Thomas F. Connolly (Suffolk University), "The Imagined Community of National Theatre"

Since its initial publication in 1983, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has been a paradigmatic text. Eric Hobsbawm's 1992 The Invention of Tradition also informs late-20th and early 21st century national historical discourse. Drawing upon these texts and responses to them, one ascertains that certain recent cultural phenomena insist that we engage theatrical topics with these texts. What does a national theatre mean to a local population that neither speaks nor cares to learn its performative language? One must of course consider "performative" in terms of both the language spoken on stage or used in the play text, and in those of the staging conventions of a given theatre.

For example, what does the Abbey Theatre mean to the second-largest language group in Ireland: Poles? What does the Nobel-laureate Elfriede Jelinek's work mean to an Austrian who does not frequent the Burgtheater? Can the Národní divadlo moravskoslezské ("National Theatre of Moravia and Silesia be contained in the Narodni divadlo ("National theatre") of the Czech Republic? Does America's "greatest playwright" exist if theatre students have not heard of Eugene O'Neill? Each of these questions worries the notion that "national" theatrical données are not only of particular local interest, but also indices of greater impact. What is more, the importance of the emblematics of national theatricality seems to overtake the "place" of such theatricalities in postmodern thought. Has national theatre thus been othered?

Andrea Harris (Independent Scholar), "Sur le pointe on the Prairie: Guiseppina Morlacchi and the Wild West Show"

In 1872, the hottest show in the U.S. was The Scouts of the Prairie, starring famous frontiersmen Buffalo Bill Cody and Texas Jack as themselves and featuring "real-life" American Indians as their vicious, war-whooping foes. Also among this cast was Italian ballerina Guiseppina Morlacchi, playing the role of Dove Eye, Indian queen.

Studies of how Cody's Wild West shaped American identity and perceptions of American Indians abound, but the incongruous appearance of a pointe-shoe-clad, La Scala-trained, Milanese emigre as an American Indian woman has been ignored. In the nineteenth-century U.S., ballet symbolized European decadence and bourgeois taste, at odds with ideas of American rugged independence. Morlacchi's Dove Eye embodied glocality, drawing "foreign" European bodies and forms together with images of "Native" Americans in a mix of detailed contradictions and broad prejudices.

I analyze the intermixing of nation, race, and culture in this translation of a European high classical aesthetic into Wild West lore and ideology. Conflated notions of "foreign" and "native" in Morlacchi's role created a doubled otherness against which to ground the construction of the entrepreneuring American male taming the wild. What is especially remarkable in Morlacchi's performance is precisely this international perspective in national spectacle, and perhaps this complex intercultural relationship is partially responsible for past oversights. In this regard, Morlacchi's Dove Eye also questions glocality as a by-product of globalization and transnationalism, providing a surprising case study of the nexus of migrations, maps, and memories that must inform our historiographies of national identity.

Michael Jaros (UC San Diego), "Denis Johnston and the National Longing for Form"

Irish playwright Denis Johnston's 1929 play The Old Lady Says 'No!' has long perplexed theatre historians for its rich engagement with what we today term syncretism. Frequently referencing and cross-referencing diverse historical periods and figures in both Ireland and abroad, the play proves highly challenging in its attempts to graft German expressionist techniques onto a rather stolidly naturalistic Irish theatre. The Ireland of his time was "spiritually in a poor condition," Johnston claimed, and thus he did not know "if a homeopathic treatment [was] the best for her complaint."

Unpacking the play's various theatrical and theoretical codes, this paper explores the links Johnston forged between international, avant-garde experiments and the postcolonial condition of the Irish Free State less than a decade after independence. Taking its bearing from postcolonial theorist Timothy Brennan's idea of the "national longing for form"-by which various previously colonized cultures search out a form to embody their own cultural anxieties-this paper posits that Johnston was attempting to establish a new Irish theatrical form, one which might better contend with the various realities of postcolonial Ireland. Such actions, I wish to argue, highlight what Homi K Bhabha terms "national counter-narratives," which uncover "the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference." Declan Kiberd and others have shown the productive cross-fertilization of postcolonial theory in Irish studies for over a decade, but those debates have only recently expanded to include contemporary concerns about performance's influences on staging the nation. Ultimately, this paper suggests Johnston was ahead of his time in challenging the purported insularity of Irish national difference.

Kate Kokontis (UC Berkeley), "Performative Returns in the American Racial State"

My research considers the engagements of people in the United States with discourses, myths, and experiences of their "ancestral homelands." The project interrogates the ways in which the differences in experiences and representations of several differently racialized groups and histories might produce very different results in terms of possible relationships to narratives of American-ness and to literal and imaginary homelands, and how these differences might affect the ways in which what I call the "performative returns" to these homelands play out. These journeys of performative return may occur, I argue, by means other than, or in addition to, physical or geographical journeys, for example, via instances of community-building or -gathering, through rhetorical or narrative means, and/or by way of artistic practice. Performative return may be defined as a set of practices that enact a re/constitution of an identification, a place, a set of possible relationships to that place, and, in particular, communally recognized presence-through-absence of the collective memory of an ancestral homeland, and if not the place itself, then important representations, triggers, and surrogations of or for that place, which are reconstituted through actions that Diana Taylor might call a part of the "repertoire." The performative returns to which I look in this project are configured around relationships to absent, palimpsestic places that are in all instances central to the ways in which self-identified and/or externally imposed understandings of ethno-racial difference in relationship to the racial (nation-)state and its accompanying negotiations of homogeneity and management of heterogeneity are constructed.

Bill Whitney (University of Wisconsin-Madison), "American 'Fringe' Festivals: Culture Beyond Globalization?"

This study will take a look at the ways in which four "fringe" theatre festivals within the United States serve as specific articulations and reifications of both a larger style of national, albeit marginalized, theatrical practice, and how simultaneously these festivals are expressions of local, municipal identities, and reinforce a local style of theatre and subcultural artistic expression. The phenomenon of the fringe festival has grown in the U.S. over the past three decades, having been of course imported from Edinburgh, and has become an annual touchstone event for many American cities and their "alternative" artistic communities. Many of the performance offerings at these festivals are self-referentially iconoclastic, and I argue that in being so they embody a specifically American ethos, what Jeffrey D. Wright in Performing America (1999) calls "a resolutely optimistic interpretation of experience in terms of rights, privileges, and entitlements" (4).

I will explore the fringe festivals in New York City, Minneapolis, Orlando, and Des Moines (yes, there is an Iowa Fringe Festival), four quite distinct and unique American municipalities, and examine them first as aesthetic artifacts of a unitary American postculturalism. Each of these festivals also has its own distinctly local metanarrative, a multilayered framework extending down to the level of financial sponsorship by locally-based corporations as well as local not-for-profits. Finally, I will discuss how it is possible for series of uniquely stylized and individualized performances to coalesce into events which are "glocal" in many possible senses - economic, aesthetic, and cultural.

S.E. Wilmer (Trinity College), "Performing Statelessness"

The asylum seeker occupies both a local and an international position, straddling the borders of the nation state. By definition s/he is in a state of becoming, an exile of one country and not yet a citizen of another. S/he is in a liminal state or a kind of no man's land, a non-person contained by the nation in a specially contrived holding centre, effectively deprived of human rights, and subject to deportation at any time. Giorgio Agamben has applied the concept of bare life or homo sacer to the stateless person, particularly in regard to victims in the German concentration camps, and other critics have extended his theories to refugees and asylum seekers. Cecila Sjoholm has questioned the presumption of equal rights within the nation state, pointing out that the state denies certain individuals (such as the stateless person) the rights accorded to others. The recent dispute about the treatment of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay and in special prisons around the world, as well as the increasing legislation for the detention of suspected terrorists, has helped focus attention on the plight of the refugee. In this paper I want to use the writings of Agamben, Sjoholm, as well as Slavoj Zizek, Simon Critchley and Judith Butler to theorize this issue within the discourse of biopolitics and relate it to several recent plays and performances concerning homelessness and refugees. Drama since the Greeks has often dealt with the asylum seeker, from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus and Aeschylus's The Suppliants, to Shakespeare's King Lear. I plan to concentrate on two performances: Antigone in New York by Janusz Glowacki, which depicts Antigone (a character poised between two deaths) as a homeless exile figure who tries to bury her lover in a Manhattan public park; and Christoph Schlingensief's Bitte Liebt Ostereich, which deployed a container with refugees in a central square in Vienna (during the coalition government including the extreme-right politician Jörg Haider in 2000) and encouraged local citizens to vote in a kind of big brother knock out competition on who should be allowed to remain in the country. In both pieces we can see the detention centre as a kind of living death, a place of indefinite incarceration, which calls attention to the bare life of the refugee and the policies of exclusion in the nation state.