Dramaturgy of exile: an autopoietic exploration

Samara, Elizabeth Eustacia Evelyn (2025) Dramaturgy of exile: an autopoietic exploration. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

This thesis presents a practice-led, dramaturgical inquiry into autopoiesis in exile. It provides a methodology for the recreation or the autopoiesis, of the (writing) self in exile by presenting the emergence of a new languaging of the exilic condition within the exile but, more importantly, outwith the exile, and within the host.

Through the researching and crafting of three works of theatre and film the thesis examines the poetic self in exile through written language. The subject is vast and much discussed by many, from classical Greek and Roman antiquity to modernity and postmodernity. The innovation this work offers emerges from writing under the condition of existential peril against “authoritarian and fascist threat” (Stanley, 2024). Through dramatisation, it explores what can happen when language is instrumentalised, decontextualised and turned against its former emancipatory function. Within the chronological impetus of less than one hundred years, there is presently a virulent re-emergence of all five conditions of fascism as set out by philosopher Jason Stanley alongside numerous studies by Arendt, Snyder, Klemperer, Bertrand Russell, Ecco and many others. Exposure to this “descent to fascism” (Snyder, 2025) is taking place through traditional but also technological and complex digital means. In that sense, we are all exiles. As the writer in exile, I have thus addressed a gap in the scholarship by foregrounding the method of autopoiesis as an embodied, dramaturgically situated and performative practice of resistance under contemporary conditions of linguistic, ontological and material exclusion.

This work on autopoiesis has been designed as a philosophical pentagon of a Contract of Vulnerability constructed around the wound of exile and its potential for transforming vulnerability into a new language. The first play, LESBOS, examines the term Wound. By exposing the wound, the timing of the wound and the invulnerability of the Antigonian drama, it examines constitutive exclusion and dramatizes the conditions of exilic presence and how these may be regenerated and reimagined. The second play, A Seafarer’s Elegy, is an absurdist piece which examines the condensation of political language. Led by Martin Esslin’s 1960 study on the theatre of the absurd, it considers the sloganification of language and the potential for remaking meaning in a time of depletion of traditional codes of signification. The final piece, A Poetic Constitution for Scotland revisits Scotland as a repository of trauma and contestation and a scene of political resistance. The thesis further examines the function of literature in exile as a precondition of writing and, lastly, problematises translational and extractive poiesis in a moment when the exilic writer is mined for cultural and linguistic capital while simultaneously re-languaging, resisting and producing new dramaturgies in exile.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics; P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism; P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > School of Education
• Supervisor's Name: Phipps, Professor Alison and Davis, Professor Robert
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-85491
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 02 Oct 2025 13:10
• Last Modified: 02 Oct 2025 13:12
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.85491
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/85491