Description:
Aesthetic Citizenship: Immigration, Theater, and Embodiment in Twenty-First Century Paris is an ethnographic study of the use of theater by Parisian organizations involved in immigration, examining theater's capacity to address questions about immigrant rights, integration, and experience.
Review Quotes: "Emine Fisek's compelling and timely book is an invaluable addition to contemporary theatre studies and to all study of the relationship between cultural production and the shifting discourses of immigration in contemporary France." --French Studies
"[I]n the end, [Aesthetic Citizenship] is not so much about the immigrant experience in France as about French perceptions of it. Fişek has found an apt way to give us an intimate and nuanced view into the French national psyche with its conflicted views of immigration." --Modern Drama "Emine Fişek's timely and compelling study examines immigrant theater activism in France as a dynamic point of friction between French republican ideals and the embodied performance of citizenship in public life... The book is an exemplary study of theater and politics that draws productively on points of convergence in a wide range of recent scholarship (especially in anthropology and performance studies) to glean insights about the stakes underlying the aesthetic dimension of political belonging in contemporary France." --MLN "Thanks to the acute and careful analysis of theater practitioners and the book's generous contextualizations, Fisek's study will appeal to scholars and practitioners from a wide community of disciplines, including: French theater studies, applied theater and performance studies, community-based theater practice, migration studies, history, politics, human rights, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and activist arts." --Clare Finburgh, coeditor of Contemporary French Theatre and Performance and author of Jean Genet "Fişek accomplishes a difficult task: she offers new insights to French and Francophone theatre specialists and renders the historical nuances of French political discourse (particularly republican universalism) accessible to students and scholars in other sub-fields. She respects the peculiarity of her chosen case studies and convincingly demonstrates their relevance to broader debates. In such ways, the book will be valuable to anyone interested in theatre and citizenship, theatre and migration, intercultural theatre, community arts, performance and humanitarianism, and documentary theatre and witnessing. Fişek has made an important contribution to the literature on aesthetics and politics." --New Theatre Quarterly