"How Could We Not Go to Mosul?": Empathy, Anagnorisis, and the Politics of Recognition in Orestes in Mosul

Abstract:This article discusses Milo Rau's and the Ghent Ensemble's recent performance Orestes in Mosul (2019–2020) and the significance of representing ongoing conflict onstage. This article examines the ways in which the politics of recognition, a term coined by Charles Taylor and explored by many scholars after him, has given a renewed relevance to anagnorisis, a term coined by Aristotle and understood as a technical function of classical tragedy. Anagnorisis can be used as a means of accessing empathetic capacities that can in turn create an ethical framework for the reassessment of marginalized identities. In this way, anagnorisis ceases to be the realization of an erroneous action and becomes the protestation of an injustice and the structures of oppression that maintain and perpetuate it. Finally, this article addresses the controversy surrounding Milo Rau and Orestes in Mosul and concludes that at a time of major humanitarian crises, socially and politically engaged theatre can mean the difference between passively observing the practice of exploitation and actively practising solidarity.