Honorable Mention:
Barry Freeman, Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017)
We are also pleased to award an Honourable Mention to Barry Freeman, for Staging Strangers: Theatre and Global Ethics, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. In this provocative study, Freeman offers a new historical perspective on how theatre in Canada has engaged with its strangers – immigrants, minorities, and refugees -- and how communities formed by those experiences have used theatre to negotiate cultural space. In lucid performance analysis and textual criticism, Freeman effectively challenges the historical frame of state Multiculturalism to show how culturally specific theatre practices in Canada engage with what he calls the “liquid modern world.” His call for a “difficult and indeterminate ethics,” in which “living practices … provoke theory” is an urgent call to Canadian theatre artists and scholars to consider our impact as privileged global citizens. We congratulate Barry Freeman for his acute, timely and important intervention in the discipline.