Managing death in exile

Abstract Managing Death in Exile is a theatrical performance that draws on ethnographic research with long‐term asylum‐seekers from sub‐Saharan Africa in Hong Kong since 2012. The performance told the story of Denise (pseudonym), who had to manage the illness, funeral, cremation, and repatriation of ashes of her good friend, Rosie (pseudonym). Dying in exile means locating one's dead body in a transnational web of conflicting cosmologies, temporalities, kinship structures, and national imagination. What legal and moral strictures does death re‐introduce a body into? How does a politically, financially, and socially marginalized diasporic community get mobilized and divided in managing a co‐national's death? Denise had to manage all these issues while dealing with her own grief over the passing of a dear friend. The unconventional choice of using ethnographic theater for academic presentation came from my yearning to activate sensorial ways of knowing not available through the written word, to incite embodied responses that resemble those a fieldworker experiences in the field. Performance ethnography as a field has largely developed in North America. In the Asian context, it is uncertain how this form of “anthropology otherwise” could fit into the fierce pursuit of universities' ranking. Hopefully, Managing Death in Exile could be a start.