Critical Puppetry and the boundaries of the Human in Edwin Salas’ 7 Deadly Sins in the Border

As both surrogate bodies and bodies themselves, puppets trouble the boundaries and borders of the human. This chapter will analyse Edwin Salas’s use of puppetry and material performance in 7 Deadly Sins in the Border (2018) to explore the racialised dehumanisation of migrants and the rhetorical and physical violence which are employed to police and maintain geopolitical borders. Analysing Salas’s use of conventionally figurative puppetry alongside his use of items of food as performing objects, I suggest the material vulnerability of the latter provides unique opportunities to contest liberal humanist constructions of the human. Throughout, I assert the value of critical puppetry as a theoretical framework, arguing that puppetry, a process by which objects are humanised, can provide unique insights into racialisation, a process by which humans are objectified.