Between Solids/Monologues in Brown: A Mystory Performance

Abstract

This essay is a performance space in which I access the dramatic monologue form to juxtapose the experiences of a postcolonial body enmeshed in colonial discourses of color with the experiences of a racialized body in America. In scenes and scenarios, I excavate moments from two social archaeologies—an “old color narrative” arising from the Indian subcontinent, one that is steeped in gender, colonial longings, and filial goodness, and a “new color narrative” that has been imposed on me in the West, one that is more political and thus exclusionary. I frame these monologues as a mystory performance and analyze the ways in which it fuses with and deviates from the goals of a mystory. Finally, I offer a discussion of performative resistance by addressing how “performativity” functions in these scenes as both citationality and an “intervention upon citationality.” (Bhabha, 1994; Butler, 1990). Ultimately, I hope to arrive, alongside the reader, in an “elsewhere location” to understand the performative process of becoming “raced.”