Carcerality, theatre, rights

Carcerality, Theatre, Rights Sarah Woodland a* and Rand Hazoub a b Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia; School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication, Massey University, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. *Sarah Woodland, [email protected] Abstract The ability of theatre to imagine new futures for incarcerated communities was documented in James Thompson’s seminal publication Prison Theatre (1998). With a renewed sense of urgency around the politics and practices of mass incarceration, we wish to revisit and reorient the debate around theatre and performance in prisons. In this issue, we hope to steer the discussion away from considerations of ‘use’ and an aesthetics of redemption, and towards an understanding of the ways in which theatre and performance can highlight the rights of those experiencing state sponsored control, confinement and exclusion; and its potential in enhancing freedoms, liberty and inclusion in resistance to the carceral state. Keywords: carcerality; theatre; rights; prison theatre; applied theatre Dr. Sarah Woodland is a researcher, practitioner, and educator in applied theatre, participatory arts and socially engaged performance. She is currently Dean’s Research Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, investigating how the performing arts can promote social justice and wellbeing in institutions and communities. Dr. Rand Hazou is a theatre scholar and facilitator. His research explores theatre engaging with social justice across the fields of applied theatre, refugee theatre and decolonial theory and practice. In Aotearoa, he has led teaching and creative projects engaging with prison, aged care, and street communities. 1 Carcerality, Theatre, Rights Introduction From the world’s largest open-air prisons of Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to the refugee camps in Europe and the Pacific, to the immigration detention centres in the US, we are locking up and controlling more people than ever before. Currently more than 10.74 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, and since 2000 the world prison population has grown by almost 24% (Walmsley 2018). This global trend, coupled with the increasing privatisation of justice, raises real concerns about the potential negative impact of commercial interests on prison populations as well as concerns about the long-term sustainability of prison institutions and facilities (Jacobson, Heard and Fair 2017). Moreover, in settler-colonial nations such as Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, Indigenous peoples are vastly over-represented in the prison system (Cunneen and Tauri 2016). Threatened with the prospect of ever-increasing levels of scrutiny, surveillance, confinement, restriction and exclusion, there is an urgent need to promote ways of doing, knowing and being that illuminate, release, liberate, enhance and include. What role can theatre and performance play in highlighting the rights of those experiencing state-sponsored marginalisation, control and imprisonment? And what role can theatre and performance play in challenging the exclusionary structures of carcerality, including those that extend beyond physical prison sites? These were some of the early questions that guided the various inquires that comprise this special issue on Carcerality, Theatre, Rights. The ability of theatre to imagine new futures for incarcerated communities was documented in James Thompson’s seminal publication Prison Theatre (1998). While Thompson situated theatre in prison within the arena of ‘community or social change theatre,’ he nevertheless questioned whether theatre in prisons is about humanising the 2 system or about transforming it (15-16). Michael Balfour’s Theatre in Prison: Theory and Practice (2004) recorded developments in the field since Thompson’s publication but still noted the continuing need for practitioners to walk ‘a tightrope between incorporation into and resistance to the criminal justice system it seeks to exist in’ (3). While the field today now comprises a wide range of practices, theatre in prison is most often defined in terms of participatory programmes carried out by professionals who enter into criminal justice settings to carry out theatre workshops and projects with prisoners (Balfour et al. 2019). The field now also includes performance practices that grow from within prisons and correctional institutions that place those most affected by incarceration at the centre of the work (see Prendergast 2016). Recent scholarship also includes performative interrogations of punishment and criminality; and interrogations of how prisons and ‘criminals’ are represented in and through different performance cultures (see Walsh 2019). The ubiquity of prison theatre programmes that focus entirely on the works of Shakespeare, predominantly in the USA, has led to the naming of a whole sub-genre in itself—Prison Shakespeare—documented by Rob Pensalfini (2016) in his survey of that field. Caoimhe McAvinchey (2020) has recently made a timely contribution in focusing specifically on women in the criminal justice system, whose unique experiences of ‘intersectional societal disadvantage’ (1) remain marginalised within the fields of criminology, penology, and prison theatre itself. In her recent publication Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (2021), Ashley Lucas explores the various strategies that prison theatre deploys for ‘community building’, ‘professionalisation’, ‘social change’ and the activation of ‘hope’. Despite these meaningful and substantiative impacts, Lucas questions the redemptive narrative associated with prison arts and insists that ‘theatre can promote free thinking and empathy, but it is not, in fact, liberation’ (2021, 39). 3 Certain recurring themes persist within this field: how practitioners frame theatre projects with incarcerated communities; the privileging of transferable skills and therapeutic benefits that come from participating in performance; and the need for critical and methodological models to help evaluate these benefits to promote the use of theatre and performance within criminal justice. Despite ongoing critical scholarly interrogations of prison theatre, the work has most often been framed in terms of prevention, rehabilitation or reintegration (Keehan 2015). Accounts of the work often remain characterised by narratives of individual transformation and reform, with those who participate often being drawn into prevailing discourses around the redemptive power of the arts, and arts programs being deployed as a method of ‘masking’ the injustices of the prison system (Cheliotis 2014). It is now 23 years since Thompson’s publication first questioned the role of theatre in either transforming, or being co-opted by, the prison system (Thompson 1998). Yet much of theatre prison praxis remains preoccupied with notions of utility. This points towards a key tension that has pervaded the field since Thompson’s collection first appeared. While many practitioners and scholars adopt a critical (sometimes radical) stance in approaching the work, they nevertheless are often required to articulate its ‘benefits’ to corrections authorities and the wider public in ways that conform to neoliberal logics of personal responsibility and individualised rehabilitation. With a renewed sense of urgency around the politics and practices of mass incarceration, we feel it is important and timely to revisit and reorient the debate around theatre and performance in prisons. In this special issue we do not seek to question the validity or benefits of theatre and creativity to incarcerated communities, but rather to steer the discussion away from considerations of ‘use’ and an aesthetics of redemption, towards arguments that highlight the importance of art as a fundamental human right 4 and a potent form of resistance. We hope that this invites practitioners to consider their own responsibilities in relation to the work, and that it might inform their abilities to advocate for and articulate its benefits in new ways. We also hope to extend the discussion about theatre and performance beyond the prison itself and criminal justice systems, to include the idea of ‘carcerality’ or the ‘carceral state’ as a pervasive neoliberal strategy for controlling and exploiting certain groups on the basis of race, economic status and gender. As such, the contributions in this special issue aim to explore the role of theatre and performance in highlighting the rights of those experiencing state sponsored control, confinement and exclusion, and the potential role of theatre and performance in enhancing freedoms, liberty and inclusion. While we acknowledge the difficulty of drawing together the complex threads of carcerality, rights, theatre and performance in a relatively short essay, we hope that the following will serve as an important provocation for further discussion and debate. This editorial begins with the section ‘Enactments of Carcerality’ which defines the concept of carcerality and provides a brief overview of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral studies. This is followed by ‘Enactments of Rights’ which provides an overview of rights conceptions underpinning the contributions to this special issue. These include conceptions of human rights, Indigenous rights and cultural rights, while acknowledging that rights discourse can be seen to encompass a number of related areas such as citizen rights, Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination and social justice. In the final section, ‘Enactments of Theatre, Rights and Justice,’ we review some of the previous work interrogating the interconnections between theatre, performance and human rights, before briefly exploring theatre work engaging more specifically with rights and carcerality. In this section, we propose a conception of prison theatre as a political performative that has the potential to undermine the logics of carcerality by 5 reinstating aesthetic justice and cultural rights and revealing, through imaginative acts, alternative realities to those that have been perpetuated and normalised through colonialism, neoliberalism and the carceral project. This assertion is supported by the diverse and fascinating contributions to this issue, which we summarise in the concluding section and contextualise with some general comments about how this collection might re-orient our fields of inquiry. Enactments of Carcerality With etymological origins to the Latin ‘carcer’ for ‘prison’, carcerality today is concerned with a wide range of sites and technologies, beyond the conventional prisons that most would associate with incarceration. These sites range from missions, reserves and residential schools established to contain Indigenous peoples; to immigration detention centres and refugee camps; to ‘black sites’ or secret prison facilities used to detain enemy combatants in the global war on terror; to tightly controlled open-air prisons such as the West Bank and Gaza, or the Chinese ‘re-education camps’ for Muslim minority Uighurs. Carceral studies is also concerned with the proliferation of ‘invisible’ surveillance technologies being used to govern, segregate, control and partition populations on a large scale—in the streets, in the home and online. Within the context of mass incarceration and surveillance, carceral studies is becoming an increasingly urgent interdisciplinary field of research and praxis. Central to the interdisciplinary project of carceral studies is to interrogate the origins of the carceral state, how it continues to expand and impose a punitive and confining logic on both public and private spaces, and to explore what impact this has on our lives and cultures. This extends into areas such as carceral geographies or the spaces and places of detention and imprisonment; carceral economies, or the often exploitative and precarious nature of neo-liberalism and free-market capatialism; carceral mobilities, or 6 the increasing restrctions placed on the movement of certain bodies not only across state borders but within societies; and carceral cultures, which encompasses how societies perform, represent and resist carcerality through cultural practices. In Ruby Tapia’s definition, the carceral state encompasses: The formal institutions and operations and economies of the criminal justice system proper, but it also encompasses logics, ideologies, practices, and structures, that invest in tangible and sometimes intangible ways in punitive orientations to difference, to poverty, to struggles to social justice and to the crossers of constructed borders of all kinds. (Tapia, 2018) The proliferation of technologies of survelience and control from prison sites and their increasing incorporation into the wider public domain has also been accompanied by resistance and activism against carceral regimes. The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 again drew attention to the disproportionate criminalisation and over-incarceration of African Americans in the US. Elsewhere, the movement highlighted yet again how colonial legacies of disadvantage, over-policing and overincarceration continue to disproportionately affect Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial nations such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Cunneen and Tauri 2016). This includes the insidious operation of ‘carceral webs’ (Anthony 2020)—the interacting government systems of child protection, policing, criminal justice, health and education—that keep people caught in a perpetual state of ‘systemic entrapment’1. In the US, White supremacist attitudes and government policies underpinning these systems have been described by Michelle Alexander (2010) as ‘the new Jim Crow.’ In addition, the increasing privatisation of justice raises serious concerns about the 1 See ‘Systemic Entrapment’, The University of Wollongong, https://www.uow.edu.au/globalchallenges/building-resilient-communities/systemic-entrapment/ 7 potential negative impact of commercial interests on prison populations, including the exploitation of incarcerated people through widespread programmes of low-cost labour, and concerns about the long-term sustainability of prison institutions and facilities (Jacobson, Heard and Fair 2017). Following Goffman’s (1961) theories of the ‘total institution’ and Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish (1991), a significant thread within carceral studies has emerged, which examines the performative nature of punishment and the effects of confinement and carcerality on bodies, identities and cultures. Crucially, building on the work of leading scholars such as bell hooks (1981), Angela Davis (2003) and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2013), the relationship between culture and carcerality is now also being explored from Black, Indigenous and non-Western perspectives, where the impacts are most keenly felt. We find some recent innovations in the carceral cultural field provide inspiration in expanding our conception of prison theatre. Indigenous Stó:lō Scholar Dylan Robinson (2020) draws the Anglo-European museum into the web of carcerality, describing how Indigenous lives and cultural artefacts have been locked up in sterile spaces that deny them their life and liveness as ancestral beings. Similar to the treatment of Indigenous peoples themselves, Robinson highlights how ceremonial and cultural objects have been removed from their networks of culture, kin and community and incarcerated in a ‘civilising’ space. In her recent book Prison Cultures (2019), Aylwyn Walsh draws together examples of prison theatre into a broader project of performance-based feminist cultural criminology that examines (among other things) how women are expected to perform in ways that often reinforce their oppression within neoliberal carceral structures. In Metaphors of Confinement (2019), Monika Fludernik explores the ‘carceral imaginary’ as an imaginative field that cycles between our assumptions and beliefs about carcerality, how these feed into (and are fed by) cultural 8 representations of prisons and criminal justice, and how these inevitably contribute to the formation of public discourses and policies. Her project acknowledges the carceral field to include structures of oppression established through colonisation, including the patriarchal confinement of women in homes, ‘whorehouses’ and ‘insane asylums.’ Works such as these implicitly invite us to widen our lens in thinking through how theatre and performance in and of prisons sits within the carceral cultural field. We therefore suggest that the field of ‘prison theatre’ must expand to include an interrogation of how theatre and performance operates within global carceral webs: How does theatre and performance work to resist (or uphold) carceral regimes? What are the material, affective, ethical and aesthetic implications for theatre makers and audiences? And what do the performing arts contribute to our understanding of carceral cultures and the carceral imaginary? By engaging with carcerality more broadly, we hope that the field can extend its criticality beyond the prison and its immediate surrounding structures, hopefully presenting a challenge to the wider neoliberal and settler colonial logics underpinning this global phenomenon. Enactments of Rights As an extension of imperialism and the colonial project, the expansion of the carceral state continues to legitimise the erosion of basic human rights for large numbers of people across the globe. Recently, Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic have simultaneously illuminated many questions around human rights. The attack on the US Capitol building in 2020 demonstrated the wildly asymmetric nature of the carceral state’s operation in the US. BLM protesters had previously been subjected to tear gas and rubber bullets, snatched up from the streets by unrecognisable law enforcement officers and thrown into unmarked vans (NPR, July 17, 2020). In the 9 subsequent attack on the Capitol, several members of the police forces opened up the barricades to allow Trump’s insurgents (mostly White men) to sack the seat of democracy and then politely escort them off the premises (New York Times, January 7, 2021). These hypocrisies were documented and broadcast for the world to see, once again raising questions about whose rights are routinely honoured and whose are violated. In addition, the pandemic saw privileged (mostly) White people forced to contend with carceral logics of containment, isolation, surveillance and conformity that are usually reserved for ‘others.’ Many of these people invoked their rights in protest. For them, as ever, the notion of human rights seemed an end in itself, existing as independent from any sense of responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of their fellow human beings. Meanwhile, pre-existing human rights violations in prison systems the world over were exacerbated and prolonged as a result of the pandemic, with incarcerated people experiencing even more extreme isolation from outside, a lack of access to legal and other visits, extended periods of lockdown in their cells, or in some cases overcrowding and heightened risk of exposure to the virus (Stewart et al. 2020). The premise of human rights is that each one of us is entitled to the same basic rights and freedoms. Human rights are not privileges, and they cannot be granted or revoked. They are inalienable and universal. Enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration after the horrors of the holocaust and the Second World War, human rights as an aspirational project have been an effective platform to extend basic freedoms and liberties to various groups and individuals experiencing oppression. However, at the same time the universal claims and the narrow focus on the ‘human’ dimension of rights discourse has been challenged by Indigenous and non-Western scholars. The universal claim underlying human rights discourse has been criticised by cultural relativists for eliding important differences between cultures and for imposing ‘Western’ cultural 10 standards that privilege notions of individuality (see Bhabha 2002; Donnelly 1984). The concept of ‘Asian values’ emerged in the early 1990s to challenge Western rights rhetoric (Langlois 2001; Mahbubhani 1998). These values purported to promote, among other things, the prioritising of the community over the individual, and the privileging of order and harmony over personal freedom. Despite these distinctions, Lucy Fiske and Jim Ife argue that universality does not necessarily enforce ‘sameness’, rather it is a principle that enshrines the essential worth of every human being while allowing for and even encouraging cultural and religious diversity (2006, 302). In approaching the notion of ‘rights’ for this issue, we recognise the plurality of how these are idealised, defined and enacted in the context of a globalised society; and the different manifestations of rights in terms of whether they deal with human rights (as enshrined by the Universal Declaration ), citizen rights, cultural rights, Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination, social justice, and aesthetic justice (to name just a few examples). We therefore offer the notion of rights as a provocation to adopt an activist stance in our discussions about the ‘utility’ of theatre and performance in and of carcerality. Enacting ‘Human’ Rights Adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) has shaped an understanding of human rights as universal, inalienable and indivisible, as rights shared equally by everyone regardless of sex, race, nationality and economic background. Beginning with an emphasis on the rights of individuals to human dignity, the UDHR emphasised civil and political liberties (Articles 3-19), social and economic rights (Articles 20-26), as well as communal rights including the right to a just and stable international order (Articles 27-28) (Cranston 1973). Unlike citizen 11 rights which are derived from membership of a nation state and are thus contingent on nationality, human rights are derived from a belief in a common humanity, regardless of social markers such as race, religion, gender or educational status (Fiske 2006, 222-23). As Jack Donnelly explains, the basic fundamental idea of human rights is that they are ‘rights that one has simply because one is a human being’ (2013, 10). Within this context, the insistence on human rights can be a useful platform to resist carceral logics that increasingly exclude groups of peoples from enjoying basic rights through dehumanising discourses and practices. As Paul Rae argues in Theatre and Human Rights, ‘The category of “human” must be defended against those who consider that some people are more human than others’ (2009, 74). While prisons are predominantly about restricting prisoner movement as a public safety measure, the way they work often means that other rights are also affected such as the right to culture, the right to vote, and the rights to work and fair payment. Investigating how prisons might move towards human rights compliance in Australia,2 Anita Mackay (2020, 32) cites Goffman’s (1961) notion of ‘total institutions’ to suggest that prisons facilitate the loss of personal autonomy, abuses of power, and powerlessness caused by rules and disciplinary proceedings, which negates their capacity to comply with international human rights obligations. She finds that these conditions are exacerbated and rights are further contravened by all-to-common occurrences of ‘overcrowding, increasing levels of violence, lack of adequate treatment for people with mental illness and disability, lack of resources for educational and work programs’ (4). Jennifer Turner (2012) notes that the loss of liberty associated with 2 After shocking revelations of abuse and torture in a youth detention centre in the Northern Territory in 2016, Australia has recently ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) (see Naylor 2020). 12 incarceration entails the denial of other citizenship rights which often impacts much more detrimentally on minority groups. Moreover, disenfranchisement during incarceration contributes to ‘a spiral of decline of prisoners having little or no expectation to perform obligations […]’ (Turner 2012, 324). In attempting to shift the conversation about the value of arts in prison, we argue that their importance within carceral settings lies not just in their utility and their individual rehabilitative potential. Their importance also resides in their potential to progress ideals of human rights and social justice within the context of global hyperincarceration, as we will discuss further below. We begin, however, with the notion that the engagement with arts and culture is itself a human right. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that ‘everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’ (UN General Assembly 1948). Theatre in prison is not just about giving incarcerated individuals an opportunity to be creative. The very idea of engaging with arts and culture in carceral sites tests our commitment to universal human rights and can potentially help us restore and promote inclusive notions of citizenship. As Easton (2008, 128) suggests ‘a rights-based approach is central to both moving the prisoner from the status of a non-person towards citizenship and to achieving the improved treatment of prisoners and raising standards in prisons.’ In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Department of Corrections recently released a new development strategy entitled Hōkai Rangi 2019—2024. The strategy explicitly states that: ‘Access to culture is a fundamental right, not a privilege’ (Hōkai Rangi Strategy 2019, 17). This is a significant shift in policy that acknowledges the importance of artistic engagement in carceral settings as a right. The hope is that this signals an ongoing responsibility to provide opportunities for incarcerated communities 13 to participate in art and theatre programs to enhance the dignity of prisoners. Yet this project has been tarnished by ongoing rights abuses of incarcerated individuals.3 Enacting Decoloniality and Indigenous Rights A consideration of human rights discourse and the Western liberal conceptions that underpin them must also contend with efforts to decolonise rights and the narrow focus on ‘the human’ as a project of Western Enlightenment and ongoing Western Imperialism. As a political and epistemological movement, decoloniality is aimed not only at the liberation of colonised peoples, but at transforming ways of thinking, knowing, and doing (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015). Decoloniality proposes that the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000) did not end with colonialism, and that the modern capitalist world-system imposes a racial/ethnic classification of people as a basis for global exploitative and extractive power-structures. According to Walter Mignolo, decoloniality involves ‘working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ’ (2017, 459). He argues that decoloniality involves ‘delinking’ from Eurocentric 3 In the New Zealand context, in December 2020, the Human Rights Commission released a new report “Time for a Paradigm Shift: A Follow Up Review of Seclusion and Restraint Practices in New Zealand” (Shalev, 2020). Among the report’s findings was that the use of seclusion remains disproportionality high with Māori and Pacific Peoples. The report also documented that disproportion use of seclusion within women’s prisons, where Māori women made up 78% of all stays in the most restrictive form of segregation in 2019 and were segregated for longer than European or Pacific women (2020, 8). In March 2021, New Zealand Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis ordered an urgent overhaul of Auckland Women's Prison following allegations of ‘degrading’ and ‘inhumane’ treatment of prisoners. The overhaul was triggered following allegations of unreasonable use of pepper spray and confinement cells (The Conversation, 23 March, 2021). 14 categories of thought to ‘change the terms and not just the content of the conversation’ (ibid.) For Nelson Maldonado-Torres, decoloniality involves the production of ‘counterdiscourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts,’ aimed at breaking down ‘hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, 10). From a decolonial point of view, human rights discourses are considered to be one way in which patriarchal White sovereignty exercises its power, enabling the law and government to intervene in the lives of Indigenous people: ‘To let them live and to make them live as welfare dependent citizens, not as property owning subjects with sovereign resource rights’ (Moreton-Robinson 2009, 77). The very concept of universal rights is derived from state centric forums while ‘Indigenous nations’ responsibilities to the natural world originate from their long-standing relationships with their homelands – relationships that have existed long before the development of the state system’ (Corntassel 2012, 92). Felipe Isa argues that the progression of the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights has led to more open discussions about the concept of human rights and its implications. According to Isa, the Western liberal conception of human rights has been changing in recent decades: ‘Indigenous reality and diversity have been gradually shaping and influencing a multicultural interpretation of human rights’ (Isa 2014, 754). As an example, the impact of decolonial and Indigenous conceptions of rights can be traced in the granting legal status and personhood to the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2017, the settlement of claims between Indigenous Māori communities and the state of New Zealand led to the introduction of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act, which dictates that the Whanganui River is a living entity and a legal person with rights that can be judicially enforced by appointed guardians 15 (Argyrou and Hummels 2019, 752). The Act recognised the Whanganui River as a singular entity that is ‘indivisible’ from its people, as well as enforcing the Whanganui Iwi Māori tribe’s customary property and fishing rights over the river and its protection from exploitation and misuse (Morris and Ruru 2010). In the global arena, the rights of Indigenous peoples to their culture and intellectual and cultural property have been recognised by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (UN General Assembly 2007). This has helped to shift the focus from individual Western conceptions of rights to highlight the importance of collective rights and the rights of Indigenous peoples to their culture, land and resources. Enacting Cultural Rights According to the Human Development Report (2004), of the five categories of human rights—civil, cultural, economic, social and political—cultural rights have received the least attention. This neglect is linked to certain reservations about cultural rights including arguments about cultural relativism, the protection of cultural traditions that might violate other human rights, as well as the sense that cultural rights are considered ‘luxury’ rights which should be addressed once other material rights are addressed (Human Development Report 2004, 28). Since the signing of the UDHR, several conventions and resolutions have acknowledged the importance of cultural rights as inseparable from human rights. Cultural rights were recognised in Article 5 of the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity and can be defined as the right of access to, participation in and enjoyment of culture (UNESCO 2001). The importance of cultural rights were also enshrined in the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. Principle 1 of the 2005 UNESCO convention states: 16 Cultural diversity can be protected and promoted only if human rights and fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression, information, and communication, as well as the ability of individuals to choose cultural expressions, are guaranteed (UNESCO Article 2, 2005). The convention acknowledges that cultural rights are a fundamental expression of human rights and that the provision of cultural rights and access to cultural expression can be an important means to address social inequities. Indeed, in 2016, the Human Rights Council adopted unanimously a resolution calling upon all States to respect, promote and protect the right of everyone to take part in cultural life, including the ability to access and enjoy cultural heritage, and to take relevant actions to achieve this (Human Rights Council, 2016). As this history suggests, cultural rights have become increasingly important consideration within human rights discourse given the associations between culture, identity, and social equity. Cultural rights include the notion that ‘all citizens should have access to and be able to participate in the artistic and cultural practices of their choosing’ (Caust, 2020, 1). Those who participate in cultural life may have a stronger sense of fulfilment as a human being, better wellbeing outcomes, a stronger sense of social cohesion, and a stronger sense of responsibility and commitment towards the wider community (see also Laaksonen 2020). Yet despite their recognition within international law, individuals, groups and communities continue to be denied their cultural and artistic rights. Moreover, a recent report assessing the global state of artistic freedom warns of the emergence of a new global culture of silencing others (Freemuse 2020). According to this report, in 2019, there were 85 artists known to be detained in 27 countries, and 23 artists known to be prosecuted in 13 countries (Freemuse 2020, 14-15). Freemuse reported that the rationale 17 for these detentions and prosecutions was politics, ‘indecency’ and religion, with censorship being the most common violation of artistic freedom. This is arguably most keenly felt in prison systems, where cultural rights are routinely ignored or violated under the guise of maintaining security and ‘good order’; where free artistic expression is censored or withheld from public view in order to maintain a favourable image of the institution; or else opportunities for access to cultural expression are minimised in order to project a ‘tough on crime’ agenda that conforms to perceived public expectations. Further, authorities might silence cultural expression within sites of confinement as a strategy for removing identity and agency, or use access to arts experiences as a form of leverage to encourage good behaviour and impose discipline. Gustavo Dalaqua (2020) invokes Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed (2006) in formulating the concept of ‘Aesthetic injustice’ as an extension of, or precursor to, epistemic violence and injustice. He describes this as ‘any harm done to someone specifically in her capacity as an aesthetic being,’ that is, to feel and imagine (1). In adopting this philosophical orientation, Dalaqua invites us to consider further the moral imperative of making access to artistic and cultural expression an urgent priority for those who experience incarceration. Enactments of Theatre, Rights and Justice There is a growing body of scholarship that explores the intersections between theatre and rights. In the introduction to their edited collection, Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin (2015) cast a wide net in defining a ‘theatre of human rights,’ drawing on a Deleted: any and all forms of theatre that deal with issues of equity and social justice into the flow of variety of theatre forms engaging with social justice into their discussion. They employ the frame of ‘unspeakability’ to explore how theatre, Exploits silence, site, the body, gesture and objects in order to speak to, for and against. By connecting directly with communities to which they speak, theatre and 18 performance can interrogate anew the convention of representing human rights abuses as unspeakable, the unspoken expectations and assumptions that drive forms of human rights advocacy, and the forms of unspeakability at the heart of certain political histories. (6) Paul Rae (2005) interrogates the relationship between theatre and human rights that he believes is often expressed with an uncritical sense of conviction and ‘haziness’— one that belies the complexity of the correlation. He draws a number of performance practices and contexts into his discussion, from the thematic treatment of human rights issues in plays, to activist and participatory performance with explicit human rights agendas, to performances that challenge human rights norms (1-2). While offering a Deleted: He offers critical exploration of the relationship between theatre and human rights, he Deleted: , nevertheless insists that theatre provides ‘a means of holding our actions, ourselves and our societies up to scrutiny in light of human rights concerns’ (22). Deleted: which when they are united, can result in uneven, sometimes questionable results. He cautions, that even when theatre can be seen as ‘enacting or claiming a right, there is nothing inherently virtuous in it’ (33). Florian Becker, Paola Hernández and Brenda Werth (2012), argue that human rights are a ‘core concern’ of twenty-first century theatre and performance. This concern is tied to the ways of knowing offered by theatre and its capacity to ‘generate human connection through sensorial intensity, social intimacy and the joint physical presence of bodies on and offstage’(2012, 3). The authors argue that what connects theatre most significantly to human rights are ‘the specific qualities of theatrical imagining—and particularly its instrinsically public character’ (emphasis in original, 2012, 3). For the authors, the connection between human rights and theatre is the notion of the public sphere, that allows participants to imagine themselves as a community of peers who Deleted: that possess the same fundamental capacities for autonomous action and rational reasoning (ibid., 8). While we accept the imaginative, sensorial and embodied affordances of theatre, the links between human rights public performance are problematised by the notion of carcerality which is predicated on the segregation of prisoners from the public 19 and confinement of bodies in captivity. This has provoked us to reconsider the intersections between theatre and human rights as an imaginative performative, which we outline below. Theatre, Carcerality and the Political Performative While it is beyond the scope of this paper to conduct a comprehensive review of works that could be seen to sit at the intersection of theatre, carcerality and rights, we would cautiously suggest that producing theatre inside prison, at the very least, insists on the rights of prisoners as human beings in the face of increasingly dehumanising carceral logics. Following Augusto Boal (via Paulo Freire), dialogic, interactive and participatory theatre is seen as a model for healthy democratic processes. This approach (or ethos) can be enacted inside a prison to engage the most marginalised members of society in explicitly asserting their human rights and citizenship through performance (see Hazou 2021, Heritage 2006, Young-Jahangeer 2020); or to provoke performers and audiences to critically and aesthetically interrogate the very structures and webs of mass incarceration (see Billone 2009, Dowling and Forbord, Woodland 2020). Lucas (2021) suggests that the ideals contained within Boal’s (1985) Theatre of the Oppressed inform much of prison theatre, which aims to create social change by first being able to imagine what a different and more just world would look like. According to Lucas, ‘Prison theatre casts incarcerated people in roles outside their present circumstances. It provides a literal representation of those in prison as capable of inhabiting other environments and identities’ (148). The roles to which Lucas alludes include those that are represented within a performance, as well as the recasting of subjects away from oppressive social roles such as ‘prisoner’, ‘criminal’ or ‘victim’ that are embodied and perpetuated through the logics of carcerality, and towards those that might gesture towards their full humanity and dignity. This has the potential to affect 20 individuals’ self-perceptions in ways that are at times life changing, while also influencing how incarcerated individuals are ‘seen’ by those around them (Woodland 2019). In her important study of applied drama, Helen Nicholson (2014) dedicates a chapter to human rights in performance, suggesting, ‘Despite the many contradictions and debates about how a human rights agenda might be legitimately furthered, it remains one of the abiding utopian ideas upon over which there is general international consensus’ (130). Applied theatre engaging with human rights might be seen to embody a ‘utopian performative’ (Dolan 2001), focused on ‘taking collective responsibility for the performance of rights, and recognising the creative opportunities afforded by envisioning social change’ (Nicholson, 151). Of course, as we have indicated earlier, a decolonial applied or prison theatre practice must be anchored within the diverse visions for social change or ‘utopias’ that exist within communities or groups, rather than imposing a uniform set of ideals from outside. Jill Lane argues that theatre and performance offer a fundamental gesture: ‘Representing and materially enacting social change’ (emphasis in original, Lane 2012, x). For Lane, the potential of theatre resides in its use as ‘aesthetic practices to “liberate” a social and political imagination in the very moment of performance’ (emphasis in original, ibid.) Public enactments that engage in rights and justice potentially offer what Benjamin Arditi (2012) calls ‘political performatives’—actions that, in protesting a present injustice, both enact and enunciate a future political order. That future may be imminent only for the duration of the performance, but the performance nonetheless reorganises our political imagination in that moment. Arditi writes, ‘Political performatives anticipate something to come as participants begin to experience—they begin to live—what they are fighting for while they fight for it’ (2). 21 The operation of a political performative not only occurs through performances of resistance to carcerality (as in the case of Heritage’s Staging Human Rights [2006]), but also through the collaborative, relational acts of group discussion, devising, rehearsal and presentation; as well as acts of spontaneity, playfulness, imagination, intimacy and emotion—all of which implicitly undermine the punitive logics of the institution and the carceral state and work towards reconfiguring the carceral imaginary and promoting aesthetic justice. Political-utopian performatives can arguably play an important role in advancing abolitionist discourses by doing the imaginative work of enacting possible worlds beyond carcerality. The theatre can potentially contribute to answering the question Angela Davis poses: ‘Why should it be so difficult to imagine alternatives to our current system of incarceration?’ (2003, 105). For Davis, a de-carceration strategy involves envisioning alternatives to carcerality—demilitarisation of schools, revitalisation of education, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance (Davis, 107). Prison abolition is an imaginative project, and theatre as a communal, participatory and imaginative activity can play a potentially important role in imagining a future that does not rely on punitive approaches to crime and justice, but instead finds ways to work together to restore victims, perpetrators and communities and heal the harms associated with crime and inequality. While it may seem idealistic to approach theatre, performance and carcerality from these perspectives, we nevertheless feel that the institution and language of rights might provide artists with some foundational tools for advocacy that will help move the discussion beyond ‘fixing’ problematic individuals so that they can return to being ‘productive’ members of their (often-unjustly configured) communities. Human rights, 22 and the international legal frameworks and languages associated with them, remains one of the only widely held set of values with which oppressive regimes can be somewhat held to account, and given that some jurisdictions as described earlier are making at least cursory efforts towards enacting human and cultural rights within their criminal justice strategies and policies, we suggest that this can be leveraged towards normalising artistic practice in carceral institutions. We also suggest that this framing invites practitioners—especially those of us who work from positions of privilege ‘outside’ carceral institutions—to recognise that there is nothing ‘inherently virtuous’ (Rae 2009, 33) in what we are doing. We must critically attend to our responsibilities and obligations in relation to the carceral state; while at the same time acknowledging the complexities and limitations of aligning theatre and human rights, especially in a carceral context. As we outline below, the articles in this issue approach this work from both sides, exploring how practitioners and researchers can—and must—work ethically and aesthetically to resist the oppressive structures underpinning mass incarceration and much prison arts practice; and how making and presenting these works, and the works themselves, can represent a political performative that might undermine the logics of carcerality, and reveal alternative realities to those that have been perpetuated and normalised through colonialism, neoliberalism and the carceral project. Carcerality, Theatre and Rights Today The collection of articles in this issue represents a diversity of perspectives on the potentials and limits of theatre and performance as a tool for resistance to the carceral state. Drawn from practices occurring in India, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Italy, New Zealand and the United States, these works grapple with Thompson’s original provocation as to whether or not theatre and performance can contribute to transforming the institutions, systems and structures of mass incarceration, or whether it remains a 23 form of ‘decorative justice’ (Cheliotis 2014)? While it has been unintentional on our part as editors, it is perhaps fitting that five of the contributions to this issue have come from the United States, signalling an (arguably new) sense of urgency to interrogate issues of power and White supremacy within the prison arts landscape in that country.4 While the works here are predominantly focused on theatre occurring inside prisons, they nevertheless engage with wider notions of carcerality and the carceral state, with eight scholarly articles that analyse the practices of theatre, performance and carcerality from a range of theoretical standpoints; and two reflective essays that document the personal journeys and key events that have influenced long-term practitioner-scholars. Commensurate with a decolonial approach to scholarship that acknowledges a range of embodied knowledges and experience, the special issue includes two contributions from practitioner-educators who have experience working in the field of prison theatre and who offer invaluable expertise. The acknowledgment of embodied knowledge is reflected in Reggie Daniels’ contribution, which draws on his experiences as a previously incarcerated Black man being involved in theatre for the first time and the transformative impact this had on his life. In his call for a new kind of political theatre, Florian Malzacher argued that we need to create ‘politically ‘engaged theatre … 4 This has also coincided with SiPC4—the fourth annual Shakespeare in Prisons Conference 2020-2021, hosted by the University of Notre Dame USA. Moving away from more general discussions of prison Shakespeare as a tool for self-discovery and rehabilitation, conference organisers have for the first time adopted a ‘call to action’ approach in response to BLM and the renewed focus on racial injustice in the USA. Conference streams have included conversations about ‘prison reform,’ ‘Shakespeare as a scaffold for social justice’ and ‘antiracism in practice’ (https://shakespeare.nd.edu/about/news/2020-shakespeare-inprisons-conference-information/). 24 where things are real and not real at the same time. Where we can observe ourselves from the outside whilst also being part of the performance’ (Malzacher 2015, 30). In his article, Reggie Daniels discusses how performance offered him this dual perspective, empowering him to re-write his life story not just as an antagonist but as the protagonist. Daniels’ contribution also offers an insight into the embodied experience of carcerality and particularly the structures of White domination in the US which is poignantly described as a constant sense of threat and restriction in his life— as ‘oppressive fingers around my throat.’ Importantly, Daniels describes that it was through education and his involvement in theatre that he was able to find a language to describe these oppressive structures and also critique their presence in educational and art programming used in prison settings. In his early description of prison theatre, Thompson argued for the need to put those people ‘most affected by the criminal justice system’ at the centre of prison theatre work (1998, 20). This call is taken up authoritatively by Daniels, who reflects on his own experience delivering art and education programs to mainly Black men in prison. The importance of embodied knowledge is also reflected in the contribution by Jonathan Shailor, an educator and practitioner with over 25 years’ experience (Shailor 2011). In his article, and among other reflections, he recollects a powerful exercise exploring authentic movement when a prison participant unstrapped his prosthetic leg and began rolling around on the carpeted floor, in an ecstatic release of energy. For Shailor, in a setting where personal expression is habitually and rigidly circumscribed, the spontaneous movement demonstrated the liberating potential of theatre. Shailor’s embodied and experiential knowledge ultimately came into conflict with the prison authorities when a proposal for future theatre work was rejected on the grounds that it did not qualify as ‘evidence-based programming.’ Shailor then details the lengths of 25 advocacy he instigated, including a media campaign and petition, to get the program for future theatre work approved by the Michigan State Department of Corrections. Diana Taylor’s (2003) distinction between the written archive and the spoken repertoire constitutes a point of entry for Cletus Moyo and Nkululeko Sibanda to explore the role of performance as a mnemonic method to ‘generate, record, and transmit knowledge’ (21). Moyo and Sibanda’s article interrogates the contested history of Gukurahundi – a series of unconfirmed massacres of thousands of the minority Ndebele speaking people of south-western Zimbabwe between 1983 and 1987. The authors detail how Gukurahundi historical events have been represented on the stage in two productions, Talitha Koum-Someone Lied! and 1983 – Years Before and After, which were both performed as part of a the regional Intwasa Arts Festival KoBulawayo in 2018. The authors argue that the government enforced censoring of the Gukurahundi events constitute a form of ‘psychological incarceration’, and they explore the role of theatre in providing public memorialisation, redress and an acknowledgement of the various repertoires of traumatic and embodied knowledge that persist in the community. The idea of embodied knowledge that persists beneath ‘official’ history is also taken up by Javier Perez, who invokes Derrida’s (1994) ‘hauntology’ to describe the spectre of slavery that haunts the ‘Coloured’ community in Cape Town South Africa. Perez reflects on a theatre and poetry project, The Maroon Project (2019), which sought to unearth the forgotten legacy of the ancestral runaway slaves or maroons, who are also known as ‘droster gangs’ in the Cape. The project which is described as an ‘ode to an engaged remembrance of the drosters’ attempts to evade Eurocentric notions of linear history in order to unsettle a carceral logic that continues to erase and silence the inheritance of enslavement by members of the Coloured community. 26 A potent feature of carceality is the deployment of regimes of visuality and surveillance to circumscribe subjects. Postcolonial theatre scholars Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins (1996) draw attention to the authoritarian and ‘imperial’ gaze implicated in the action of watching theatre which allows audiences to ‘watch over other(s)’ - which is precisely what characterises ‘looking relations between the coloniser and the colonised’ (248). This ‘authoritarian gaze’ that is imbricated in normal viewing conventions functions to deny subjects their full humanity. Regimes of visuality and surveillance are taken up by Nicholas Fesette, Bruce Levitt and Jayme Kilburn in their article that explores the work of the Phoenix Players Theatre Group, founded in 2009 by incarcerated men at the Auburn Correctional Facility in Upstate New York. In analysing the Phoenix Players’ work, the authors draw on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) theory of the ‘right to look’ in order to understand how prison theatre functions within and against the visual regime of carcerality. The authors describe how the Pheonix Players employ non-traditional performance perspectives to resist the ‘panoptic’ regime of Western theatre in order to create a different kind of seeing that allows prison participants to cohere as political subjects. The work allows incarcerated participants to create a ‘space of appearance’ within the prison walls, in which they can bear witness to each other’s full humanity and invite spectators to do the same. Prison Shakespeare is a growing body of prison theatre work, particularly popular in the USA, which focuses entirely on the works of Shakespeare (Pensalfini 2016). The popularity of this choice of text can seem problematic given the colonial baggage that accompanies Shakespeare’s dramatic works, which remain firmly linked to their history as both products of Western cultural values and tools adopted in service of Western hegemony. As post-colonial scholars point out, for the last two centuries Shakespeare has been used by educationists and administrators to celebrate the 27 superiority of ‘civilised races’ and ‘reinforce cultural and racial hierarchies’ (Loomba and Orkin 1998, 1). In her article exploring the Detroit Public Theatre’s Shakespeare in Prison (SIP) programme that resulted in a public performance of Macbeth in the 2018, Jenna Dreier carefully negotiates the value of engaging with Shakespeare’s texts while also arguing for the need to decolonise pedagogies in Prison Shakespeare programmes. Dreier’s article is a timely intervention that responds to the question of how to do Shakespeare without reinforcing hierarchical power structures that will risk further marginalising incarcerated communities and individuals. For Dreier, a decolonial theatre praxis involves prioritising of an ethics of care, prioritising process and artistic agency over polished product and conventional interpretations of Shakespeare’s text, and the prioritising of inter-relationality over individual redemption. Our own contribution (Hazou, Woodland and Ilgenfritz) considers the affordances that cultural rights might entail for decolonising prison theatre practices by exploring a documentary theatre project staged by incarcerated men at Auckland Prison in Aotearoa New Zealand. The performance was built around Te Whare Tapa Whā (The House of Four Sides) – a model of Māori health that participants engaged with as part of their therapy for being convicted of sex offences. This became the central dramaturgical device for the performance and, along with the use of masks, the approach enabled us to explore conceptions of healing that inform Indigenous approaches to justice, and reinforce the assertion of Indigenous culture as an important part of decolonising Western criminal justice systems. Oona Hatton contributes important and provocative examination of racism and White supremacy in US prison performance programmes. She draws on interviews with eleven practitioners from six arts organisations operating in Northern California jails and prisons. Placing her study within the context of the racist ‘New Jim Crow’ politics 28 of mass incarceration in the US (Alexander 2010), Hatton examines how practitioners of colour experienced racism within their own organisations, as well as an emotional toll from working in a highly racialised context. She also details how White facilitators were complicit in perpetuating racism and White supremacy within their work— failing to fully acknowledge their privilege by making ‘defensive’ or ‘evasive’ moves associated with ‘White fragility’ (as described by Robin DiAngelo 2018). Focusing specifically on the policy to prohibit ‘over-familiarity’ within the prison system, Hatton explores how this policy impacts practitioners, perpetuating White supremacy at an institutional level, reflecting ‘the racist tenets that undergird the United States’ penal institutions,’ and enshrining the dehumanising culture of incarceration. She concludes by offering a series of concrete recommendations for promoting anti-racist practices in prison performance programmes at personal, organisational and institutional levels. In his early description of prison theatre, Thompson notes the ‘blurred edge’ that exists between ‘the prison space and the outside’ (1998, 17). The blurred edge of prison theatre is explored in the article by Moupikta Mukherjee and Nirban Manna, which details the work of internationally renowned Indian actor and dancer, Alokananda Roy, and the impact of her arts-based therapies on the incarcerated community of the Presidency Correctional Home in Kolkata. The authors detail Roy’s innovative approach in taking the cultural performances developed with the incarcerated community outside the confines of the Correctional Home to be performed in public. The article makes a much-needed contribution to documenting Roy’s work and approach, also highlighting how theatre can help deconstruct mutually exclusive notions of civic and carceral spaces, or rather how performance can reclaim civic attributes and engagements from regimes of carcerality. 29 Pierangelo Barone, Veronica Berni, Cristina Palmieri and Silvana Vaccaro engage with this ‘blurred edge’ through their analysis of the impact of a theatre laboratory programme led by arts organisation Puntozero at the C. Beccaria Youth Detention Centre in Milan, Italy. As the title—‘Like an Earthquake in a Submarine’— suggests, the presence of a theatre programme, including an actual purpose built theatre inside the detention centre that is open to the public, creates a series of ructions that threaten to rupture and destabilise the ‘totality’ (drawing on Goffman 1961) of the institution. The authors explore the confluence of tensions between institutional security imperatives, corrections policy and the ‘right to rehabilitation’, educational skills-based programming, and the pursuit of artistic expression—all of which figure ‘impact’ in different, sometimes-opposing ways. They advocate for a more open, dialogic approach to reconciling some of these tensions so that the programme can meet the diverse needs of the stakeholders involved. Conclusion The works here share several common threads that we feel reflect some of the central concerns of theatre, performance and carcerality today, and how the work can deepen its engagement with notions of rights. Several contributions address theatre and performance in the context of the ongoing settler-colonial project of hyper-incarceration that has its roots in colonial violence and slavery. Key articles specifically explore how prison theatre programs must engage with anti-racist and decolonising discourses in order to challenge their complicity in oppression, racism and White supremacy and better meet the needs and attend to the cultural rights of incarcerated communities. Many of the contributions explore in different ways how theatre and performance might move beyond an aesthetics of redemption towards an embodied and relational aesthetics. This emphasises ‘re-embodiment’ for incarcerated (or formerly incarcerated) 30 performers in ways that challenge the physical and somatic restrictions brought about by traumatic legacies of colonialism, slavery, and incarceration. Within these contributions, there is a focus on the sometimes-transgressive acts of intimacy and relationality among artists, performers and audience members that further undermine the neoliberal logics of isolation and containment. The one feature that sets these contributions apart within the greater corpus of prison theatre research and evaluation is their engagement with the politics of mass incarceration globally and in each of the respective countries from which the projects stem. While some of the works here may acknowledge the potential of theatre and performance in promoting individual education or transformation, this is framed within the context of a wider project that acknowledges the structures and functions of carcerality— an ideology that cordons off profit and privilege for some, while developing increasingly insidious technologies of marginalisation and oppression for others. As such, we suggest that these works invite prison theatre practice and scholarship to widen its scope: to explore how theatre and performance can highlight the rights of those experiencing state sponsored control, confinement and exclusion; and its potential to resist the carceral state by enhancing freedoms, liberty and inclusion. References Alexander, M. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press. 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