David Dean and our former colleague Daniel McNeil won the 2022 Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Patrick O’Neill Honorable Mention Award for their collection of essays Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) co-edited with the University of Ottawa’s Yana Meerzon. The citation reads:
Writing from the spaces of embodied memories, affective theorizing, and diasporic experiences, Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture closes the gap in socio- political, cultural and transnational debate around issues of precarity, representation, and ethics of appropriation of migrants bodies and stories in theatre and performance. Taking deep and serious inquiry on the (mis)representation of migrants in various sites of performance, ceremonies, and performative spectacles, the authors of this anthology intrepidly explore an analysis on postnationalism and transnationalism by foregrounding the agency of the im(migrants). By drawing on theatre, performance, and interdisciplinary studies, this anthology contributes in expanding the analysis of the processes that bodies and objects go through located in between the transit of time and space. The authors from different disciplines cultivate a discourse on postnationalism by entwining a fresh way of examining the precarity of the (im)migrants’ bodies. These authors hold the memory of a diasporic discourse built from an intricate and excellent interweaving of theory and practice emerging from a migrant-centered lifeworld. When theatre becomes malignantly stereotypical, this book challenges our inherited consciousness about representation of the underrepresented and marginalized bodies in theatre and performance through a re-reading of the diasporic experiences and the agonies of those who have histories of war and displacement by re-centering their imaginaries and narratives. The language is brilliant and the dialectic is outstanding; this book is extensive, provocative, and written from a global perspective. The authors of this anthology are masters of their own craft. For those artists and scholars who carry in them a long history of diasporic blood and deep sense of longing of their original homeland, this anthology is a home.