Title Information
Title
Disorientations: Theatricality and Contemporary Asian American Performance
Name: Personal
Name Part
Mok, Christine Y
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2013
Physical Description
Extent
viii, 236 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note
Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2013)
Name: Personal
Name Part
Ybarra, Patricia
Role
Role Term: Text
Director
Name: Personal
Name Part
Schneider, Rebecca
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Kim, Daniel
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Lim, Eng Beng
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Theatre Studies
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Genre (aat)
theses
Subject
Topic
theatricality
Subject
Topic
theatre
Subject
Topic
racial identity
Subject
Topic
representation
Subject
Topic
identity formation
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1057829")
Topic
Performance
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/818620")
Topic
Asian Americans
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1149217")
Topic
Theater
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/1061714")
Topic
Photography
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/887402")
Topic
Dance
Subject (FAST) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/999953")
Topic
Literature
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20131219
Language
Language Term: Code (ISO639-2B)
eng
Language Term: Text
English
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how theatricality and performance enter into the scene of contemporary Asian American cultural production. I argue that Asian American artists and writers, working across different aesthetic media, take up theatre and its forms, to reveal impossibility and the inauthentic as paradigms of racial identity and identification. My project traces these theatricalist turns as disorientations of cultural nationalist politics, rooted in authenticity and mimetic crisis, by examining Maxine Hong Kingston’s writings, Young Jean Lee’s plays and productions, the transnational collaboration of choreographer Dean Moss and Yoon Jin Kim, and photography by Nikki S. Lee and Laurel Nakadate. In this study, I pose a set of questions about representation and identity formation: How do the writers and artists take up the theatre as both the principal site of investigation and the means with which to stage an interrogation of Asian American racialization? With these performances, what kinds of political possibilities and impossibilities does this aesthetic and temporal re-framing provide? How does theatricality imagine and enact alternative modes of identity and belonging? <br/> <br/> While each of the art objects archived in this study represents a discrete medium (literature, theatre, dance, photography), they all trouble the boundaries between media through their use of theatre and theatricality within their own given genre. By focusing on theatricality, I chart how separate media overlap in their engagements with a politics of inauthenticity through the aesthetics of (im)possibilities afforded by turns to the theatre. In rubbing up against the limits of representation both in their own media and in their borrowed theatrics, each of the works examined pushes the limits of racial representation and embraces disorientation’s potential for and in failure.
Identifier: DOI
10.7301/Z079431J
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/")
In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access
Collection is open for research.
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations