Engaging difference through theatre: Border pedagogy in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia’s location as a crossroads between East Asia and South Asia, marks it as a region deeply entrenched in difference. Its history marks it as a region that is highly complex, where apart from indigenous cultures that have survived the tides of change, there are several deeply embedded influences from East Asia and South Asia, the West and elsewhere that have become integral aspects of what is local (Reid, 2015). Education that seeks to deepen an understanding of this history and recognize its value as a resource for regional coherence and cooperation must then negotiate the borderlines of culture that have contributed to how Southeast Asian nations apprehend themselves, and in relation to each other. In this article I propose a critical approach to ‘regionalist’ education in Southeast Asia by engaging with issues of culture in teaching and learning contemporary theatre. I deploy Henry Giroux’s border pedagogy as a working frame to grapple with difference in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to his view that borders are expressions of power that need to be interrogated through pedagogies of difference. I then describe and analyse how the learning process and assessment tasks created for an undergraduate module on Contemporary Theatre in Southeast Asia at a teacher-education institution in Singapore, offer students a space to work with pedagogies of ‘difference’ and ‘discomfort’ and thus reconfigure the boundaries of their identities and communities as potentially local, regional and global.