Conclusion: On the Lessons of Exilic Theater, Performing Exile, Performing Self

Abstract

As Arjun Appadurai notes, in today’s post-exilic globalized world the experience of exile and migration has become the norm of the social habitat: the age of globalization rests upon cultivating a sense of people’s mobility and thus it reinforces the state of displacement as its major distinctive quality. “We need to think ourselves beyond the nation,” Appadurai writes. “This is not to suggest that thought alone will carry us beyond the nation or that the nation is largely a thought or imagined thing. Rather, it is to suggest that the role of intellectual practices is to identify the current crisis of the nation and, in identifying it, to provide part of the apparatus of recognition for postnational social forms” (Appadurai, “Patriotism and its Futures”, 411). Accordingly, today it is the experience of exile that teaches one the lessons of postnational condition, global citizenship, transnational lifestyle, or better cosmopolitan reality (Appadurai, “Patriotism and its Futures”; Agamben, Means Without End; Simpson, “The Limits of Cosmopolitanism”; and Rebellato, Theatre & Globalization; among others). This reality forces one to reconsider the aesthetics of the exilic performative as rooted within the unresolvable tension between 1) the exilic artist’s highly personalized, idiosyncratic discourse, marked by this artist’s particular exilic experience, cultural referents, linguistic means, and the chosen mode of artistic expression, and 2) the same artist’s search for the language of his/her expression comprehensible for a wide range of international audiences, if not all people of the world.