Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar online on Thursday, 14 March from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

In a 2012 editorial, Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider define precarity as “life lived in relation to a future that cannot be propped securely on a past.”1 Responding both literally and immediately to their perspective, this paper considers precarity in the context of Australia’s refugee crisis during the early twenty-first century. Here I explore a current concern around the notion of “information precarity,” specific to the question of asylum seekers’ rights to access digital technologies (particularly mobile phones) in detention centre settings. Questions of information precarity, human vulnerability and “states of precarity associated with the contemporary moment of neoliberalism”2 are focalised through a discussion of Kurdish-Iranian author Behrouz Boochani and his 2018 novel ‘No Friend But the Mountains.’3 Boochani’s work, written during his six-year internment at an Australian offshore processing centre for refugees, draws on his experiences in the precarious space of statelessness. I also explore how, both in and against this asylum setting, Boochani succeeded in publishing his book via SMS communication with his translator and publishers. Drawing on work by Butler,4 Ridout and Schneider,5 and Wall, Campbell and Janbek,6 I interrogate notions of precarity and resistance in light of Boochani’s experience.

Rebecca Clode is the Ethel Tory Lecturer in Drama at the Australian National University. Her current research project for the Freilich Foundation is titled “Performing Resistance: A Study of Literary and Theatrical Interventions into Australia’s Refugee Crisis.” The project, which examines works by Behrouz Boochani and playwright Helen Machalias, aims to better understand the role of literature and performance as vehicles for refugee activism in Australia. Rebecca’s broader research interests include playwriting practices and Australian theatre history. Recent publications include an article co-authored with Julieanne Lamond for Australasian Drama Studies: “Pivoting Resilience: Australian Women Playwrights and the COVID-19 crisis.” Her 2021 monograph is titled Australian Metatheatre on Page and Stage: an exploration of metatheatrical techniques (for Routledge). Rebecca is a PhD graduate of the ANU and also holds an MA in Text and Performance Studies from King’s College and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. Prior to her academic career, she was a theatre practitioner, and she now maintains her practice locally, for example as dramaturg for playwriting development projects with Canberra’s Street Theatre. She has recently come on board an Associate Co-ordinator for the SLLL’s WellSpring Series with the Street Theatre.