2026 Theses Doctoral

Minerals on Stage: Twenty-First-Century Western Theatre and Extractivism

Yalgin, Ali

This dissertation examines how twenty-first-century Western theatre represents and responds to extractivism—a process that renders both humans and land expendable. Focusing on the representation of minerals in text and performance, I trace how theatre registers and defamiliarizes the extractive habitus, that is, the dispositions that reproduce and legitimize resource-dependent subjectivities. Drawing on theatre studies, ecodramaturgy, and energy humanities, I analyze works centered on uranium, coltan, and lithium, three minerals with outsized material and metaphorical significance in the post–World War II West.

Chapter 1 explores the perceptual mechanics of Marie Clements’s Burning Vision (2002), which complicates the habitual separation of the mundane and the nuclear. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between extractive habitus and theatrical spectatorship in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (2007) and Adam Brace’s They Drink It in the Congo (2016), two plays addressing coltan dependency. Chapter 3 analyzes nostalgia and utopia in green extractivist dispositions through Al Smith’s Rare Earth Mettle (2021) and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Lithium (2020–21).

All of these works place a mineral at their center, subvert its expendability, decenter the resource-dependent subject, and use theatre or immersive space to ask what it would take for spectators/participants to alter their modes of perception and imagine coexistence beyond extractivism. I argue that theatre’s versatility—as a medium that remediates other media and collapses the divide between the material and the cultural—makes it uniquely capable of re-constellating human–mineral relations in anticipation of a post-extractive future.