DISPLACED: AID, PERFORMANCE, AND THE SURVIVAL OF INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS

Abstract

At various times in history, performance has served as a crucial laboratory for promoting positive change in society. By spotlighting existential issues, interrogating superstructures, and subverting stereotypes, it has shaped and guided the way we live in the world and how we react to the multifaceted questions that our interactions with each other generate. Performance has also reaffirmed the notion that human persons experience the world in different ways; hence, our understanding of the world ought not to be consigned to mere statistics and words, but should encompass the sundry modes through which we experience and know the world, including sounds, images, feelings, gestures, tastes, smell and touch. By employing performance ethnography as both a lens and a method, this dissertation articulates these various (visceral) modes of understanding the world, within the context of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria and their vexed relationship with humanitarian actors. Humanitarian actors’ failure to involve IDPs in decision-making processes that concern the latter have exacerbated the plight of IDPs. Through performance ethnography, which recognizes the agency and the unique voice, memory, and context of minoritarian populations, IDPs can now reclaim their narratives and position themselves in such a way that will make humanitarian actors respond to their real needs. The underlying conviction of this dissertation is that, until displaced populations become the narrators of their own experiences, no matter how bleak or beautiful these might be, the dominant narratives that project their reality to the outside world will not only be partial and exclusionary, but will also privilege the norms, perspectives, and prejudices of the external storyteller, no matter how well-intentioned that person might be. And, until the unique views, needs and context of displaced persons get mainstreamed into humanitarian interventions, the goal of ensuring the wellbeing and security of displaced persons as well as their eventual return home will remain elusive. By adding performance perspectives and unique case studies from IDP camps in Nigeria to the existing body of knowledge on internal displacement, this study will illumine in the humanities the long-overlooked nexus between performance and internal displacement. It will equally build on literature portraying IDPs as valuable members of society who possess prized repositories of knowledge from whom scholars, policymakers, artists, and humanitarian actors can learn a lot if only they engage them as people and change agents rather than as mere objects of research and helpless mendicants in perpetual need of aid.