ABSTRACT
In her article, Hypatia Vourloumis investigates theatrical speech acts in Indonesia that occupy postcolonial, national, autobiographical and psycho-cultural realms, focusing on the key question of how these acts challenge official narratives of national and cultural production. Picking up on the central issue of national monolingualism also addressed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Vourloumis examines how a language meant to unify an Indonesian archipelagic multitude within a single state identity comes to be both the material for the transmission and concretization of postcolonial authority and a means for those resistant to that authority. Defining acts of paralanguage as vital and inescapable parts of theatrical speech acts, Vourloumis points to the ways in which paralinguistic performances materialize dissonant interjections to the nation-state’s formal linguistic apparatus and its coded values and meanings.
