Speaker
Description
This paper reconceptualizes the refugee crisis in David Greig’s The Suppliant Women (2016) by shifting the analytical frame from geopolitics and ethics of hospitality to eco-displacement. While scholarship has largely focused on democratic negotiation, gendered precarity, and the politics of reception, the play’s evocation of land, sea, and elemental forces invites a deeper reading that foregrounds the environment as an active participant in human flight. Bringing together material ecocriticism and migration studies, this paper argues that the Danaids are not solely political subjects seeking asylum but material objects whose displacement emerges through entanglements with nonhuman agencies.
The women’s flight across the Mediterranean is narrated not only as escape from forced marriage but as movement through volatile, agential landscapes—sea currents, winds, and terrain figure as co-shapers of their condition, rendering refugee a trans-corporeal negotiation. The production’s ritualized staging—use of natural materials, choral invocation of elemental forces, and emphasis on embodied proximity between performers, audience, and space—further positions ecological crisis as constitutive to exile. Thus, situated within the interdisciplinary framework of crisis studies, this paper explores how Greig’s play reveals the porous borders between ecological, political, and emotional emergencies. By merging performance analysis with environmental humanities, it demonstrates that crises of migration, gender, and ecology are mutually constitutive rather than distinct phenomena. The Suppliant Women as a drama of eco-refugee suggests that displacement must be read not only in terms of political sovereignty but also in relation to planetary vulnerability. In doing so, The Suppliant Women becomes a site for thinking across disciplines—where theatre studies, climate ethics, and material philosophy converge to articulate the complexity of living in a permanently crisis-driven world.
| Keywords | David Greig, The Suppliant Women, refugee crisis, material ecocriticism, eco-performance, crisis studies |
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| igulter@firat.edu.tr |