The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage by Jeffrey K. Coleman (review)

Jeffrey K. Coleman’s first book strikes an inadvertently elegiac tone in the age of COVID-19, with the future of theatre in Spain in doubt, as in so many places around the globe, and the fortunes of the far-right nationalist party Vox on the rise. Compared with its European neighbours, Spain was long thought to be an outlier in terms of xenophobic political formations, a characteristic usually ascribed to the relatively late onset of mass immigration and the rejection of authoritarian rhetoric and policies in the wake of the Franco dictatorship (1939–75). Covering the quarter of a century between 1991 and 2016, The Necropolitical Theater constitutes an eminently readable survey of plays written about the subject of immigration, with the three principal chapters addressing distinct non-white communities: Latin American, North African, and sub-Saharan African. The author, a Ghanian immigrant to the United States via Spain, marshals sociological and textual analysis to advance his principal hypothesis that dramatists, “despite aiming to humanize the immigrant experience, actually reify the sensationalized, autochthonous anxieties that are often found in the media and in politics” (3). Theatre, in other words, might be part of the problem as opposed to the solution.

For example, the first chapter critically deconstructs how and why Latin American women, disproportionately employed in sexual and domestic labour, are variously presented as hypersexual and savage or submissive and docile. Such dramatized clichés, the author suggests, constitute a form of symbolic violence, complicit in “necropolitical captivity, a state in which the captive is never killed but rather socially and mentally dead to the rest of society through isolation and marginalization” (21). Placing Achille Mbembe’s thinking on the relegation of some immigrant groups to the status of zombies into dialogue with Lisa Marie Cacho’s notion of social death, Coleman unpacks how four plays written between 1997 and 2016 present their female immigrant protagonists as trapped within the home or in brothels. There is, he suggests, a normative as well as a descriptive aspect to such depictions, as the clear intimation is that such female victims would have done better never to have emigrated from Latin America.

The situation is perceived to be even worse for non-Hispanic arrivals. Since the first pateras were reported entering Spain in 1991, the occupants of these perilous small boats have become a source of national fascination. It is not necessary to downplay the dangerous nature of many journeys taken from Africa to acknowledge, in line with Coleman, that the attention paid to them by both the media and theatre is disproportionate given that only around one per cent of immigrants in Spain first entered the country by this means. Coleman elsewhere contends that “there has yet to be a Spanish immigration play that displays a story of black survival, wholly contradicting the existence of thousands of black Spaniards living in Spain today. The lack of positive stories about the lives of black migrants (or black Spaniards) maintains a necropolitical narrative that equates blackness with death” (117). Given the overt racism that has often existed in Spain – Coleman remarks on the association of Africans coming from the jungle in advertisements for Conguitos chocolate peanuts or Cola-Cao chocolate drink – it is easy to see why more liberal Spanish practitioners and audiences might be less self-reflective about their own practices and prejudices. Although casual racism is hardly unique to Spain, it is particularly blatant: the town archivist in the rural town of Soria still has golliwogs proudly on display in his office, or at least he did when I last carried out research there in 2019.

It is impossible to understand the post-2016 reactionary turn in Spanish national(ist) politics without considering the laissez-faire approach to immigration policy and engrained hierarchies that Coleman skilfully documents. Since 1985, the Spanish authorities have excluded western Saharans, former imperial subjects, from...