Petrol Imaginaries: Dystopian Theatre and the Metabolic Rift in Kuwaiti Drama
a research seminar by Faisal Hamadah
co-hosted with Sussex English Colloquium and Middle East and North Africa Centre at Sussex (MENACS)
5:00pm | Wednesday 10 February
For Zoom Invite: please register here.
Why is climate change so difficult to speak about? In what ways might we understand this difficulty as a symptom of wider political economic processes? This talk will pose these questions through an analysis of two recent Kuwaiti plays. The first of these, Sulayman al-Bassam’s Petrol Station, was written in English and staged at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Petrol Station is a dialogue driven, intimate riff on King Lear; two sons living in a petrol station in an unnamed border vie over their father’s inheritance as war threatens to spill over and disrupt their life. The second play, New Jibla, was staged in Kuwait’s Jaber al-Ahmad Cultural Center, Kuwait’s new opera house. Purportedly a contemporary national epic, New Jibla was a large-scale production that utilized science fiction trappings to stage a national political allegory. It tells a story set in the far-flung future after humans have evacuated Earth due to some unnamed catastrophe and settled on Mars. While both plays were staged with a purported aim to enliven Kuwait’s political theatre, and contain differing visions of ecological collapse, neither can make the link between Kuwait’s oil economy and the ecological collapse that underpins the worlds they stage. By drawing on recent Marxist ecological frameworks, this talk will use the plays to understand the total absence of climate change as an issue in public discourse in Kuwait.
Dr. Faisal Hamadah recently completed his PhD in Drama at Queen Mary University. He works on cultural history, performance and political economy with a focus on the Arab world.
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