Since the very late 1990s, a new figure has emerged in the work of Asian women playwrights in Britain, the refugee and asylum seeker. This figure occupies a different position in the history of migration and diaspora from the ones that dominated plays by Black and Asian women playwrights during the 1980s and until the second half of the 1990s, since – as the plays discussed below indicate – that figure occupies a space of extreme abjection, made distinct by the history of a violent past, lack or absence of citizen status and all the rights that this, at least in theory, confers, loss of community and all socio-emotional connections, complete disempowerment and objectification in the present, and uncertainty or a tragic ending governing the future. What this figure bespeaks is the changing reality of migration histories and diasporic experiences, for the refugee or asylum seeker is unlike the economic migrant who does not necessarily suffer the memory of a history of violation during war or political conflict, and who has the right to seek employment and make a life for herself. The refugee or asylum seeker has no such right; stuck, quite literally, in a confined space, the detention centre, her abjection consists, inter alia, in having to wait, becoming the object of processes the outcomes of which are uncertain (see Barkham 1999). Through the plays the audience is drawn into that experience of uncertainty, humiliation, invasion of privacy, and process of abjection that the refugee/asylum seeker undergoes.