ABSTRACT
In Chong Tze Chien’s 1998 play-within-a-play, Pan-Island Expressway, a playwright casts two local Chinese actors, one male and one female, in the roles of two Indian labourers arguing on a safety island on an expressway. Interrogated on his decision, he glibly justifies it by citing race and gender as social constructions. By casting inappropriate bodies as Indian workers in the Singapore landscape, the Chinese playwright, James Chia, hopes to ‘break down the urban myths surrounding race and gender’ and expose the ‘contrived’ nature of these identities (Chong 2002: 53). I become uneasy. Though academically trained to critically regard race and gender as fictions, to disregard bio-essentialisms, a voice within me rebels: But what about my Indian female body? If a Chinese male body can stand in for my Indian femininity, then where do I become visible and assert my presence? Black masks, white skins, I retort – this is the new colonialism, a local version of the ‘blackface’ act, a Chinese minstrel show that commodifies and consumes my racial Otherness, turning it into a fetish (Low 1996). Almost vindicated, I note that for all the fictional playwright’s lofty intentions of transcending ‘skin colour’ in order to reach for the ‘humanity, the common thread binding us all together’ (Chong 2002: 53), with which surely I must identify, he still requires his actors to put on Indian costume, marking the very skin colour he wants to dispel as racial boundary (ibid.: 50).
