Mwenya Kabwe

This chapter presents a narrative case study of Dr Mwenya Kabwe. Mwenya is a Zambian-born theater performer and scholar. Her work rests at the intersection of African theater and performance, migration, immersive and site-specific performance work, live art, collaborative and interdisciplinary art making, and re-imagining African futures. A self-described reluctant academic, we share Mwenya’s storied journey across many countries and continents. In the narrative we piece realizations of otherness, moments of (un)belonging and the precarity of being of many places. The chapter demonstrates the arbitrariness of university processes, the intersectional nature of xenophobic experiences, and the survival strategies that one academic is developing to continue in the South African academy.