Refugees, Visual Culture and Theatre: Reinscriptions and Contestations (original) (raw)

2023, Performance, Resistance, Refugees

We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we take them for real and begin to 'lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all'. (Bleiker 2001, 509) The representation of refugees is a particularly troubling example of what Roland Bleiker describes above. In an age where visual culture dominates, the image is relied on increasingly for information (Wright 2002, 53). The image is seen to provide access to and knowledge of 'real' world events and issues. In 2002, Terence Wright asserted that images occupy a key place in the primarily visual medium of television and other media and that these images are not neutral. For example, Wright argues that media images of refugees are part of a universalising lineage of visual culture which has its 'origins in Christian iconography' (53). This means that refugees are cast visually, for example, in an Adam and Eve 'rags and ruin' 'state of degradation' or, in flight like Mary and Joseph's 'Flight from Egypt' with 'few possessions' and sometimes 'a means of transport' or, in the feminised image of Madonna and Child (53-57). According to Wright, instead of photographing 'what is there', camera operators will choose to shoot images that conform to their preconceptions, or if they stray from the usual, those further along the editorial chain will make choices in selecting footage that is 'predictable' (53, 57). In the twenty-first century, this tendency to represent in accord with preconceptions extends arguably to much of Western social media and web-based reportage. Writing from an anthropological perspective, Liisa Malkki identifies the development of a 'standardized way of talking about and handling "refugee problems" among national governments, relief and refugee agencies, and other non-governmental organizations' that emerged in the post-World War II era (1996, 385-86). She argues that media representations then aligned with this standardisation, resulting in 'transnational commonalities in both the textual and visual representation of refugees' that are translated readily and shared across state