Decolonisation and performance studies: Questions from the border

Extending efforts to articulate the decolonial project in theatre and performance studies, by revisiting the terminologies and thinking around “border epistemology,” this article establishes the intellectual and political agenda of GPS' Special Double Issue "Decolonisation and Performance Studies" by inviting its authors and readers to consider a future for performance studies that is more challenging to hegemonic configurations of power and epistemic privilege that place particular narratives, methodologies, and epistemologies at the “centre.” It is an invitation to unsettle notions of “centre” and “periphery,” critique, and explore understandings, methodologies, and epistemes towards decolonisation. Given the flaws in institutional understanding and practices around decolonisation, the authors featured in the issue, myself included, ask if it is possible to imagine a “decolonised” performance studies, or a performance studies (and scholars) that hold the capacity to decolonise the field and its institutional practices. In a field of pedagogy and scholarship whose hybrid formation and transnational situatedness potentially make it a fertile ground for activism, politicised practices, and solidarity movements, how can performance studies actively and meaningfully offer critical methodologies and frameworks as part of a broader process that can enable the making of just futures? How can the field contribute to undoing the implications of colonial violence, and dismantling systems of domination still prevalent today? Is there a “border” performance studies?