The Performative is Political: Using Counter-Storytelling through Theater to Create Spaces for Implicated Witnessing

Performative counter-storytelling can be a powerful experience for both the artists who create these stories and the audiences who witness them. This study examined audience responses to a counter-narrative (entitled "AMKA") performed by Africans in Australia which intended to present more complex, holistic, and strengths-based representations of their communities than those currently circulated by dominant discourses. Guided by a critical whiteness lens, the study explored how 34 self-identifying white audience members interpreted the performance and how they questioned whiteness by assuming the role of implicated witnesses. Following thematic analysis of mixed closed- and open-ended post-performance survey responses, audience members made connections between the content of AMKA and the contemporary political and cultural contexts in which it was performed and began to examine their positions of privilege and power. This study has provided evidence for the potential of political theater in creating spaces of encounter whereby responsible listening positions can be nurtured in the journey toward dismantling personal, and potentially structural, racially-based injustices.