2023, Vol.36, No.3

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

This paper aims to explore the role of the Metaverse in performance. Amidst the unexpected Covid-19 pandemic, the Metaverse emerged as an effective alternative platform, allowing people to interact freely despite the restrictions on public gatherings. The prolonged period of social distancing led to a surge in virtual theater performances as a new societal practice. However, with the transition to an endemic phase, the Metaverse performances experienced a swift decline. In investigating the Metaverse performance, this paper begins with the inquiry of whether mimesis fosters subversiveness or merely exists as the subordinate other to the real. Although the idea of theatre as a virtual space is not entirely novel, the Metaverse complicates the binary opposition between the notion of the virtual and the real by striving to render the virtual as realistic as possible. This paper examines Travis Scott’s virtual concert hosted on the online game platform Fortnite in 2020 and adopts the concept of “liveness” and reconsiders the extensively debated discourse between Peggy Phelan and Philip Auslander from the 1990s as the theoretical methodology. While Phelan characterizes ephemerality as the ontological condition of performance, Auslander acknowledges the mediatized nature as constituting “live” performance. This paper examines the quandary encountered by Metaverse theater. On one hand, Metaverse performance acknowledges the audience/user’s subjectivity by promoting an immersive experience. On the other, the genre fundamentally undermines the audience’s subversiveness, as their subjectivity relies on simulated liveness.

Unlike the legal and ‘normal’ immigrants who made a significant contribution to the post-war British economy, the so-called illegal (undocumented) immigrants in British political and social discourse have been portrayed as the criminals who sponge off welfare benefits and abuse Britain’s hospitality. They lacked “a narrative of entitlement” which the Commonwealth immigrants such as the Windrush generation devised and used for their fight against racism. Their prescribed criminality prevented them from being engaged in the demand for justice and recognition, and their invisibility was a symptom of their wider social and political exclusion. Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, a 2002 British film set in contemporary London, aims to ‘visualize’ the invisible illegal immigrants through spatial representations and cinematic space. Defining London as a paradox and illegal immigrants as the unrecognized, unappreciated labor, Frears focuses on the hidden relations of capitalist exploitation within the global city. The oppressive relations of power, capital and space are represented through hierarchical division of space, the way the characters occupy space and move through it, and the motifs of the exchange and movement of dismembered body parts for organ trade and transplantation. This paper examines how Dirty Pretty Things represents illegal immigrants through spatial politics. Chapter II deals with spatial representation of illegal immigrants mainly through the camerawork capturing the dark side of London. This is subdivided into three parts; disrupting ‘tourist gaze’, representing migrant body through detour and invisibility, and linking the different spaces. Chapter III identifies racism, law and state power, and global capitalism as three main forces creating oppressive space for illegal immigrants, and finally, Chapter IV investigates the possibilities and limitations of resistance for the main characters in the film.

Released on Netflix in 2023, Beef stands out among drama series produced by the Asian diaspora cast and crew, as it does not solely focus on racial consciousness about Asians. The writer and director Lee Sung Jin explains that the racial identity of Asians is just a part of the authenticity of the contemporary experience he aims to portray through Beef, not the entirety. In other words, rather than making the racial identity of Asians a central theme, it is a part of the portrayal of today’s shared experiences that he seeks to capture in the drama. To achieve this, Beef emphasizes the affect of anger. This paper aims to discuss the meaning of the affects presented in Beef, as a representation of contemporary experiences, including those of Asian diasporas. Prior to delving into the anger, it is necessary to understand melancholia as another underlying affect flowing at the forefront of the piece. Melancholia is derived from the ideological effects of neoliberalism, arising from the intersection of race and class, essentially representing the zeitgeist of late capitalism. Anger, as another major affect in the work, not only originates from melancholia but also serves as a crucial driving force in the development of the narrative. As an affective surplus, anger drives the narrative to the extreme and opens a structural excess, making the transition of the formal mode from realism to non-realism plausible. Consequently, in the final episode, which is a sort of coda, Beef employs a surrealistic aesthetic to criticize the reality that produces racial and class-based others while simultaneously aesthetically implementing a political vision that transcends it.