Performing Xenophobia: A Conversation with Jonathan Nkala and Bo Petersen (Interviews) (Interview‪)‬

Conversations across boundaries of identity--whether national, religious or something else--begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you ... attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than you own. So I'm using the word "conversation" not only for literal talk but also as metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others. And I stress the role of the imagination here because the encounters, properly conducted, are valuable in themselves. Conversation doesn't have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values. (Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006:85) There has been a proliferation of debates on the underlying causes of the surge of xenophobic attacks between March and May in 2008. The aim here is to show how exploring xenophobia "as performance" can contribute additional insights not readily available in the popular media or works such as the recently published collection, Go Home or Die Here: Violence, Xenophobia and the Reinvention of Difference (2009). The claim that as metaphor the meaning of performance lies not in the actual nor the fictitious context, "but in the dialectic that is set up between the two", (1) provides a useful point of departure for a conversation about an autobiographical one-man play in which Jonathan Nkala performs his journey from Zimbabwe to South Africa.