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Abstract
Alongside the script of “It is In You: Health Justice Performance in Tanzania,” this article explores oral history and critical ethnography performance as dialogue-based methods of global storytelling. A cross-cultural performance project engaging the politics of development, HIV, and the body, “It is In You” hopes to host otherwise difficult dialogues by centering invitation and health justice. I consider three key groups of global storytelling participants—experts, tellers, and contributing listeners—as essential to an ethic of mutuality which cycles through stories to mobilize communities, confront neocolonialisms, and situate research in our bodies.
Notes
1. See MAMA KIWIA, IT IS IN YOU script, PART 3: “It is a forum / … In drama, / all people / are equal.”
2. See TOURIST, IT IS IN YOU script, PART 1: “… Don't you feel bad / that you're IN Africa / and you're not / helping people?”
3. See “CHUPA,” IT IS IN YOU script, PART 1: “Who told you / you were superior? / … the mirror?”
4. See “UPENDO,” IT IS IN YOU script, PART 2: “When we do the performance (…) we ask them to / break the silence (…)”
5. See “STORYTELLER,” IT IS IN YOU script, PART 1: “Mzungu! Wewe! / You ever heard the saying? / In the beginning, / the African man, he had the land (…)” Note: all but two script-pieces are adapted from direct individual interviews in Tanzania. The STORYTELLER and TOURIST – as “guides” at seemingly opposite poles of attunement – are woven together from multiple conversational threads with interviewees in both North Carolina/Tanzania.
6. See “MOVEMENT CHORUS,” IT IS IN YOU script, PART 1, 2, 3: original choreography with participants explores being drawn by others' “lines” or drawing lines (about identity, economy, health) on a community's own terms.
7. See “MZEE,” IT IS IN YOU script, PART 3: “Wewe. / Why / do / we / per -se-cute / this / girl (…)?”, for examples of centering invitation in audience-interaction, and physicality in proposed audience response to story.