Forced Migration and The Arts and the community media channel and indie publisher CivicLeicester, the publishers of anthologies like Japa Fire: An Anthology of Poems on African and African Diasporic Migration (2024) and Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction (2023) would like to build a publicly accessible database of published and unpublished UK plays and related work on migration, refugee and asylum matters.
Screenshot from "Driftwood", a performance by Faceless Arts.
Journeys Festival International. Leicester, 21 August 2016.
As part of this, we would also like to conduct interviews with playwrights, workshop leads, theatre companies, actors and others, and explore the possibility of publishing or supporting the publication, in book or other forms, of the plays and related works on these issues that individuals, community groups and companies have in their archives.
If you or your group or company are among the people who have been devising, writing, producing or staging such plays, and you would like to be part of the effort, please email and let us know.
RATIONALE
We would like to do this because we are alarmed by the escalating, military-grade propaganda crusade that British politicians, the media and the state are deploying against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, and by how - instead of giving safe passage to refugees like Britain did with Ukrainian refugees in early 2022 - Britain is responding towards people fleeing other wars, conflict, persecution, the ravages of climate change and extreme poverty by bankrolling the human zoos or human safari parks that France has transformed informal refugee camps into.
We are alarmed by how Britain is leaving the mainly Black and Brown refugees and migrants to drown in the English Channel, and is deploying the country's anti-terror and counter-intelligence infrastructure against refugees (the people using the 'small boats') under the guise of smashing people smugglers, and by how it is either imprisoning or warehousing others in immigration reception and detention centres and hotels where (because of the hostility and violence the state is engendering) the people are ending up at the receiving end acts of terrorism and arson from racists and Islamophobes.
We are equally alarmed by the extreme poverty and hardship that the British state is subjecting the people to, by its refusal to give asylum seekers the right to work, by how it has built a >£5bn industry around systematic, systemic and institutionalised cruelty and violence towards refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, and by how it is treated people like numbers to either be kept down or monetised.
At the same time, we are heartened by how, despite the vast amounts of resources, time, money and energy that the state continues to deploy towards turning refugees, asylum seekers and migrants into hate objects, public opinion remains largely in favour of giving refuge to those who need it, and to Britain remaining open to migrants.
We believe that part of the reason why people in Britian remain this positive is because of work that refugee and migrant support groups, schools, communities, faith groups, artists, playwrights and theatre companies, large and small, up and down the country, have been doing with and around migration and around refugee and asylum matters.
We believe the database, the publications and the interviews and conversations around the plays and the issues can further support this work.
ABOUT FORCED MIGRATION AND THE ARTS & CIVICLEICESTER
Forced Migration and The Arts is an international network that brings together people with lived experience of forced migration, refugee and non-refugee artists, academics and art spaces for conversation looking at work taking place at the intersection where forced migration and the arts meet.
The network, initial stages of which were developed with support from the University of Manchester’s Humanities Global Scholars Fund, hosts monthly indabas or discussion forums on the last Thursday of each month and encourages mutual support and collaboration.
Established in 2010, CivicLeicester is a community media channel and indie publisher that uses print and digital technologies, social media platforms, the arts, and online and in-person events to highlight conversations of transnational interest and significance.
Books we have edited and published include: