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Disassembling and Re-membering Self: Opaquing an Enlightened Taxonomy


 For some, “You bring the spices” may be an innocent statement. For me, it was not. Triggered by this racialized and sexualized statement, I created Taxonomía of a Spicy Espécimen, a performance art piece as well as public pedagogy that utilizes a multimodal reflection accompanied by aesthetic moving actions. Since taxonomy has been a Eurocentric enactment through which Otherness has been constructed, this public art pedagogy cooperates with its spect-actors to challenge the learned habits of hierarchizing, categorizing, and naming Otherness. As a critical self-reflective commentary for this journal, I intend to write a textual and visual description that at moments becomes storytelling vignettes about Taxonomía. At the same time, this autoethnographic account examines Taxonomía as an intersection between performance art and public pedagogy—a decolonial tactic to denounce and disrupt capitalist commodities of Black, Brown, and Caribbean Otherness for marketable consumption.