Staging citizenship: Artistic performance as a site of contestation of citizenship

Abstract

While there is already a solid body of work on the lived dimensions of citizenship, little is known about whether artistic performance in popular culture and the arts can constitute a site for staging and contesting citizenship. In this article, I argue that the literatures on voice and citizenship need to pay more attention to what performance studies approaches can offer to the study and understanding of practices of citizenship, and suggest that an expanded notion of voice as an act of self-expression, which is not purely discursive, is needed for understanding citizenship as embodied and expressive practice. By combining interview data with textual analysis, I employ performance tools and concepts from performance studies to analyse how citizenship is staged and contested in the documentary film Wait and the performance Welcome to Dreamland.