Performing Black Oceanic Borders: Towards a Postcolonial Ecocritical Dramaturgy in "Moj of the Antarctic"
4th International UTAD Theatre Research Conference “Borders & Boundaries”, İstanbul, Türkiye, 10 - 12 Eylül 2026, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
- Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
- Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.1
- İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
In Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey (2006), playwright Mojisola Adebayo employs the real-life story of Ellen Craft, an African American woman who escaped slavery disguised as a white man. Situating the play within postcolonial ecocriticism and Rob Nixon’s theorisation of slow violence, this paper argues that Adebayo constructs a decolonial dramaturgy in which the politics of representation becomes inseparable from the ethics of ecological and racial visibility. Building on Craft’s foundational act of fugitivity, Moj's journey across the Atlantic, Britain, and the Antarctic transforms geographical borders into unstable theatrical and ecological thresholds.
Rather than representing the ocean as a neutral passage, Moj of the Antarctic stages it as an archive of racial capitalism and ecological loss, reversing, as Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic framework suggests, the very itineraries of enslavement into routes of resistance. The play’s prologue invokes the geo-mythical Gondwanaland to reimagine geography prior to colonial separation, reading the tectonic splitting of Africa and Antarctica as a metaphor for colonialism and racism. Moj’s shifting racial and gendered performances expose the violence of colonial boundaries between bodies and forms of belonging. The Antarctic becomes a haunted borderland where submerged Black oceanic histories and environmental crisis converge, enacting destruction that is systematically rendered invisible. Through its oceanic mise-en-scène, the play brings human and more-than-human vulnerability into relation, challenging anthropocentric understandings of history and performance.
Adebayo’s one-person form, staging a single Black body that carries multiple erased histories, her intertextual appropriation of canonical Western texts, and her oceanic imagery collectively unsettle the boundaries between historiographic theatre, travel writing, and ecological speculation. Ultimately, Moj of the Antarctic offers a model of postcolonial ecocritical theatre in which crossing borders becomes a practice of ethical reworlding, questioning what performance can remember and what it can imagine beyond empire and ecological extraction.