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:
"Without sacrificing an exquisite attention to nuance, Aesthetic Citizenship persuasively argues its case, recasting categories like 'national participation, belonging, and citizenship' as 'spheres of experience that require rehearsal.' The book's fine-tuned analysis, enhanced by an impressively interdisciplinary frame of reference, will attract a wide range of scholars interested in theatre and performance, contemporary French and Francophone culture, gender, community-based theatre activism, and migration studies." --L'Esprit Créateur
"Interweaving archival, theoretical, and socio-political sources, Fişek's ethnographic, dialogic, and self-reflective approach calls to mind Dwight Conquergood's ideal ethnography of the 'ears and heart' as a 'co-performative witnessing.' --Theatre Journal "An essential resource that archives theater practices in France that have not been properly documented to date, Aesthetic Citizenship also makes a fresh and original argument about the complexities of the relationship of theater practice, immigration, and cultural policy in France. It's the best thing I have read in many years on the complexities of interculturalism." --Mary Noonan, author of Echo's Voice: The Theatres of Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude and The Fado House