Victimhood, Hope and the Refugee Narrative: Affective Dialectics in Magnet Theatre’s Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking

Abstract

Contemporary theatricalized refugee narratives are often understood to communicate the profound trauma associated with forced displacement, even as this trauma is made ‘meaningful’ or ‘recognizable’ to audiences by the identification, however nebulous, of hope. This article examines some of the ways in which an affective dialectic of victimhood and hope functions in Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking (2006–), a small-scale international touring work directed by Mark Fleishman and produced by Cape Town-based Magnet Theatre. Paying attention to questions of narrative and performative form, I investigate how, and for whom, victimhood and hope function in and through the work, constructing its emotional and political tensions. I trace some of the conditions of its circulation, with particular emphasis on its transnational work with respect to a metropolitan audience at London's Oval House Theatre in 2010. In this, my purpose is to probe the question of who is served (as well as who is implicated and mobilized) by refugee narratives that may occupy all too easily a generalized geopolitical imaginary: ‘far from here’.

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