Giving Ear to Death-Worlds: Necropolitical Dramaturgy, Racialised Vulnerability, and the Legal Counter-Archive in Debbie Tucker Green’s Ear for Eye

Abstract

This study analyses debbie tucker green’s ear for eye (2018) through Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, responding to comparatively limited critical attention to the dramatic forms through which the play renders racialised vulnerability perceptible. It argues that the title’s symbolic meaning, fragmented dialogue, relational naming, mirrored UK/US scenes, familial instruction, slave-code recitations, and an unresolved ending collectively establish the play as a necropolitical dramaturgy. Following a qualitative, theory-based close reading, this study traces the recurring interplay among visual capture, auditory testimony, bodily gesture, interruption, and legal language. The analysis shows that the “eye” suggests surveillance, spectacle, evidentiary demand, and retaliatory justice, while the “ear” reorients theatrical reception towards the difficult ethical work of listening to interrupted Black testimony. Within the family scenes, the play reflects parental care as an anxious pedagogy for the youth generation’s survival, through the older generation’s attempts to render racialised misrecognition into bodily instruction. Across the play’s UK and US settings, this intergenerational pedagogy stages how everyday gestures can be interpreted as possible threats within distinct yet connected histories of anti-Black regulation. The slave-code sequence, meanwhile, transforms the stage into an audible counter-archive, exposing how legally authorised disposability persists over time and takes new forms in the present. The article contributes to existing scholarship by showing that the play’s continuing urgency lies not simply in what it represents but in how sound, visuality, gesture, law, and unresolved speech make exposure before death theatrically apprehensible.