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.
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
Notes
Index
RENA M. HEINRICH is an assistant professor of theatre practice at the University of Southern California. She is a contributor to Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity and The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century.
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