Revisiting theatre of the minoritarian in neoliberalism: The Embodied Memories in Denise Uyehara’s and Dan Kwong’s Auto-performances

Abstract

In a neoliberal multicultural landscape, minoritarian artists tend to, deploying various forms of self-media or virtual platforms, create their artistic spaces for their identitarian performances. While self-media has been more and more entrepreneurially dominant, the aura of theatrical performance of the self seems to be now obsolete. Moreover, in view of neoliberalism as an increasing hegemony that has insidiously marginalized theaters of minoritarian performances (such as the New WORLD theater) in the past decade in the U.S., “minoritarian subjects” (to borrow José Esteban Muñoz’s term) are experiencing a predicament in which they are becoming more and more visually contingent owing to the neoliberal representational violence. With an urge of reviving such distant aura, this paper revisits the solo performances of Denise Uyehara and Dan Kwong staged in the Highway Performance Space, a generative site of what Meiling Cheng calls the “heterolocus”. By exploring auto-performance as a minoritarian genre, the paper examines what Diana Taylor calls the “embodied memories” in the works of Uyehara and Kwong, and further argues that these performances should not be simply understood as an individual aesthetic and political expression, but also be rendered as a powerful epistemological repertoire to perform cultural politics for the communal Asian American theater.