Sympoiesis and Scripting Urban Terror: Decomposition of a Writing Under Duress

The ‘script development’ turn in screenwriting scholarship moves us from textual concerns with the screenplay, towards establishing critiques of the social, cultural and communicative everyday worlds within which scripts are composed, written and imagined. This approach draws attention to the highly located and defined creative and institutional practices through which scripts are written. However, practice-based approaches to script development—while deeply descriptive of their specific cases—risk an anthropological privileging of the local and a myopic disregard for the transnational and global discourses that have become increasingly central to theorisations of contemporary culture. Building upon a long-term and multi-sited ethnographic study of script development practices in urban Nairobi, this chapter explores how the detailed ethnographic writing-up of specific and localised practices can in fact form the basis for broader interrogations of contemporary global culture. Presenting a narrative of the scripting of a humanitarian aid-funded feature film about urban refugees in a social context of police brutality and terrorist attacks, I argue that the everyday practices of scriptwriting can lead us into deeper critical understandings of the contemporary globalisation of ethics and its securitisation of global society. I propose that far from being just another way of thinking about screenplays, the ethnography of script development can itself become an experimental and performative critical practice that opens deeper political questions about acts that script social and cultural life at the threshold of personal experience and global politics.