Testimonial Theater and Migration Performance

This article examines Essingan, a play created and performed by returned migrants and deportees in Bamako to challenge dominant discourses on migration. The first part of the article demonstrates how the play attempts to shift the meaning of migrating to traveling, to readjust the interpretation of the migratory experience to adventure, and to claim new legitimacy. The examination highlights ambivalence to the narrative of mobility, underlining the critical moral concerns that such an approach to mobility can raise. The second part analyzes the poetics of a journey performed onstage and the strategies adopted to consolidate the alternative discourse the play proposes in the larger context of theater on migration in Bamako.