From Representation to Historical Becoming: Neo-Baroque Dramaturgy and the Reconstruction of African American Memory in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom

Suzan-Lori Parks's The Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom redefines the relationship between theatrical form and historical knowledge by replacing linear narration with a dramaturgy grounded in discontinuity, multiplicity, and performative memory. Although critics have extensively explored the play from the perspectives of African American historiography, postmodern drama, and Black feminist thought, its formal innovations have rarely been examined as part of a coherent aesthetic and philosophical project. This article argues that the interaction between neo-Baroque aesthetics and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers a productive framework for understanding how Parks reconceptualizes history as an open and dynamic process rather than a stable record of past events. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates that fragmented narrative structures, recursive dialogue, symbolic stagecraft, and shifting temporalities work collectively to undermine authoritative historical discourse and to generate alternative modes of remembering. Deleuzian concepts—including the fold, the rhizome, becoming, and repetition—reveal that the play rejects fixed identities and linear historical causality in favor of relational forms of subjectivity and continuously evolving historical consciousness. Parks's dramaturgy therefore transforms theatrical performance into a space where history is produced through negotiation rather than recovered through representation. By placing neo-Baroque theory in dialogue with Deleuzian philosophy, this article proposes a new interpretive approach to Parks's early drama and demonstrates that aesthetic experimentation functions not merely as a stylistic innovation but as a political practice that reimagines African American memory beyond the limitations of conventional historiography.