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image copyright © Matt Kenyon |
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Postcolonizing Europe? An International Workshop // May 10-12, 2010
Agnes Woolley (Leeds) - Fortress Europe: Reading Refugees in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Credible Witness
This paper examines Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Credible Witness (2001) as a re-appropriation of foundational European narratives in light of unacknowledged histories. Focusing on two asylum seekers from the disputed Macedonia region of northern Greece, the play re-poses the question of global refugeeism as a fundamentally European one, problematising the inclusion/exclusion dynamic which is one of the European Union’s constituent assumptions. Using Giorgio Agamben’s theorisations of spaces of exception, I argue that the transitory space of the detention centre, in which much of the action takes place, is deterritorialised by Wertenbaker and acts as a counterpart to ‘Fortress Europe’, the guiding metaphor which haunts the play. I will proceed to examine the ways in which Credible Witness reads the centrality of classical antiquity to European identity into the pressing contemporary concerns of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. I will suggest that this historicising technique – enacted both thematically and formally through a dialogue with classic Greek drama – not only disturbs the terms on which Europe identifies itself, but also dramatises Europe’s postcolonial responsibility to forced migrants. I will conclude by asking to what extent configuring asylum on such mythic terms has potentially universalising implications.
