Introduction to dossier – on complicity: theatre, performance, and the question of Palestine

The central question reiterated in this dossier is the one posed by queer Palestinian performance artist, poet, and theorist Fargo Nissim Tbhaki, who writes: ‘What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?’ As academics situated within institutions and nation states directly responsible for the ongoing genocide and displacement of Palestinians, we attempt to understand our responsibility to resist this subsumption – and to work instead to identify where our collective efforts can undermine the complicity in which we are each, politically and institutionally, embedded within.