Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama

Rutgers University Press
2023-06-16
194 pages,
8 bw, 3 color
6.12 x 9.25
Paperback ISBN: 9781978835535
Cloth ISBN: 9781978835542
EPUB ISBN: 9781978835559
Kindle ISBN: 9781978835566
PDF ISBN: 9781978835573

Rena M. Heinrich, Assistant Professor of Theatre Practice
University of Southern California

Mixed-race Asian American plays are often overlooked for their failure to fit smoothly into static racial categories, rendering mixed-race drama inconsequential in conversations about race and performance. Since the nineteenth century, however, these plays have long advocated for the social significance of multiracial Asian people.

Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Experience in American Drama traces the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater from the late-nineteenth century to the present day and explores the ways that mixed-race Asian identity transforms our understanding of race. Mixed-Asian playwrights harness theater’s generative power to enact performances of “double liminality” and expose the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.

Table of Contents

  • Chapter 1: Stages of Denial
  • Chapter 2: Tragic Eurasians: Mixed-Asian Dramas in the Late-Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter 3: Shape Shifting Performances in the Twentieth Century
  • Chapter 4: Cosmopolitan Identity in Mixed Dramatic Forms
  • Chapter 5: Multiraciality in the Post-racial Era
  • Chapter 6: Beyond Monoracial Hierarchies: Recovering Lost Selves
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
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