Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: This article will trace how Jez Butterworht's play Jerusalem (2009) portrays, in Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the figure of what Giorgio Agamben calls the homo sacer, the bare life, as a character that encapsulates both the scapegoat and the monster, and on which the dreams and the fears of the community equally settle (Agamben, passim). His liminal state of being signifies the watershed between accepted and unaccepted, desired and undesired, and ultimately between disenfranchised and free. In this way, the play is revealed as a depiction not only of the state of England, but of how contemporary societies treat their outcasts.
DOI: 10.2218/forum.14.633
Author: Julia Boll
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1495865191