TRANSIT

In Caroline Link's popular 2001 film Nirgendwo in Afrika, a Jewish family fleeing the Holocaust finds refuge in British-controlled Kenya. Theater plays a crucial role in the film: Members of the Redlich family explicitly call upon one another to engage in roleplaying. They make use of theater to experiment, imaginatively, with their new roles within the colonial establishment. The film's production team, as I point out, was similarly preoccupied with questions of theater and theatricality. In interviews, the film's director and producers claim that their indigenous extras struggled to understand the distinction between fiction and reality, often became overly caught up in the roles they were portraying, and could only be, not truly perform, for the camera. In this way, the film's production team discounts their indigenous extras as genuine collaborators and, ultimately, justifies their monopoly over the work of cultural representation. If theater and performance are often portrayed as opening up a path to greater political and social emancipation, we find here instead an example of how it can be used both to initiate individuals into a colonial hierarchy and to maintain and reinforce patterns of exclusion.