ABSTRACT

Brian Singleton’s aention to “the countless refugees” in the twenty-rst century registers a distinct moment in the academic making of transnational discourses. Informed by Loren Kruge’s research group working on the diasporic theatre of the US, Singleton turns to contemporary scenes across Europe and characterizes “the perpetual state of liminal rootlessness” of those refugees as indicative of a vast movement in which the world and its human geography are embaled and sent unraveling (Singleton 2003). is movement is called globalization, commonly understood as economic expansion and featuring the logic of the capital. In response to the motions of globalization, Katrin Sieg examines the issues of gender, sexuality and race in contemporary performance driven by unprecedented paerns of migration in Germany, evoking a transnational feminist genealogy and activating its analytic to “knit” scenes that expose and resist the power relations shaped by global capital, across the global, national and local sites (Sieg 2003). Rustom Bharucha’s critique of interculturalism as a neocolonial enterprise includes the Singaporean arts city variant and advocates an intraculturalcum-transnational aesthetic working within and across “New Asia” and the world, in constant contestation with the ambitions of global capital and its power relations (Bharucha 2004).