Decolonizing Identity in Performance: Claiming My Mother Tongue in Suppression of Absence

In this essay I discuss my choice to use speech in my mother tongue, Turkish, in a section of Suppression of Absence, a multimedia performance I wrote, directed, and performed and co-created with Mark Ventura in the United States, as a tool of resistance to the colonization of the self and the mind....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers (Boulder) 2020-01, Vol.41 (1), p.179-195
Main Author: Erincin, Serap
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
American English
Conversation
Feminism
Gender studies
Interdisciplinary aspects
Middle schools
Multimedia
Native language
Pilgrimages
Travel
Women
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Summary:In this essay I discuss my choice to use speech in my mother tongue, Turkish, in a section of Suppression of Absence, a multimedia performance I wrote, directed, and performed and co-created with Mark Ventura in the United States, as a tool of resistance to the colonization of the self and the mind. As an artist-scholar who was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey, and now based in the United States, I navigate the world in English in my professional work. Although as a performance studies and women's and gender studies scholar and an artist who works with various media, I chose to be positioned in interdisciplinary fields, spaces, and institutions that recognize the value of my alignment with being in-between, I realize that without conscious effort, my artistic output will remain only in the singularity of English. This essay traces my efforts to transcend this through praxis while in conversation with Maria Lugones's concept of “world”-travelling in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.
ISSN:0160-9009
1536-0334
1536-0334
DOI:10.1353/fro.2020.a755347