ARI Working Paper Series

This is a paper about the detention of asylum seekers in Australia. It looks at the detention process as a means of creating alienness and strangeness, to be effectively concealed and yet on hand to be paraded when and if necessary. The paper’s central focus will be detention as spectacle. The paper looks at the political theatrics of the detention process. Detention is seen as a performance by which the state produces and reinforces itself and the boundaries of its moral and political spaces.

The paper also studies images created by detainees themselves that convey alternative perspectives on detention, and consequently of identity, community and security. These images include the physical theatre of self-harm, the placing of one’s body on the razor wire, the sewing of one’s lips: these are forms of violent theatre with the body as the stage. The use of the mute body, to which asylum seekers have been confined, is a subversive act of re-appropriation and re-presentation of the meanings and identities of asylum-seekers. A central focus will be poetry as a means of representing alternative senses of identity, community and responsibility and, subsequently, politics and ethics that do not take the territorial border as the threshold.