Between Repetition and Oblivion: Performance, Testimony, and Ontology in the Refugee Determination Process

Abstract

In order to be recognized as refugees, asylum seekers everywhere have to go through a “refugee determination process.” In Australia, they also have to go through a “screening interview” in order to access the determination process proper. Failure at this interview results in the asylum seeker being returned to his or her country of origin as soon as possible. This essay pieces together various accounts of screening interviews in order to create a historical record, however incomplete, of these invisible and potentially lethal performances. In doing so, it argues that this tiny scrap of history has surprising significance for theory: undoing trauma studies' distinction between trauma and testimony; troubling theatre studies' claims about testimonial theatre; and complicating performance studies' taxonomies and ontologies.

Keywords:

• Refugees
• Trauma
• Testimony
• Witness

Notes

[1] Reports are listed in the Works Cited under the author “Commonwealth of Australia” and then by agency.

[2] Over the past twenty years, this department has had four different names: the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs (1993–1996), the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (1996–2001), the Department of Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (2001–2007), and the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (from 2007). To prevent confusion, I refer to it simply as the Department of Immigration.

[3] Here I am glossing Schechner's description of performing, where the performer “no longer has a ‘me’ but has a ‘not not me,’ and this double negative relationship also shows how restored behavior is simultaneously private and social” (Between 111–12).

[4] The term “mediatized” is a nod to Philip Auslander, though he himself borrows the term from Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson (Auslander 5). On the need to retheorize the social drama, see Edward Scheer's “Recomposing the Social Drama,” in which he develops an alternate concept of the “post social drama” or “social composition.”