Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre

by Shannon Steen

Overview

An exciting new work on how black and Asian racial structures were woven together within US theatrical practices in the run up to the Second World War, Steen uses this history to model how we might use performance histories to more carefully assess how racial formation occurs on the boundaries between racial groups in an international context.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230221932
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/20/2010
Series:	Studies in International Performance
Edition description:	2010
Pages:	209
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

SHANNON STEEN is assistant professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, where she is also faculty for the program in American Studies. She is the co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of AfroAsian Encounters: History, Culture, Politics. Prior to her appointment at Berkeley, she served as faculty in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Series Editors' Preface xi

Acknowledgments xii

1 How Uncle Tom's Cabin Killed the King of Siam 1

Wicked critters 1

Uncle Tom goes to Asia 21

2 Passing Between Nations: Racial Impersonation and Transnational Affiliation 33

The Jolson exception 37

The racial "real" and the passing of blackface 41

East is West and yellowface passing 44

Documenting China in The Good Earth 49

Geometries of passing 63

3 Melancholy Bodies: Eugene O'Neill, Imperial Critique, and Irish Assimilation 65

Celtic Calibans and Sino-Paddies 65

Melancholy bodies 71

Corporeal enslavement and The Emperor Jones 77

Corporeal loss and Marco Millions 91

Spectacles of racial loss 99

4 American Progress: The Paradox of Internationalism 103

Paul Robeson's Sino-Modernity 109

Mei Lanfang in America 113

Chinatown tourism 120

Racial soul: reading Mei Lanfang 127

Reprise: East is West 134

5 The Geometries of Swing: A Black Pacific and The Swing Mikados 137

The anthropological Pacific and racial indeterminacy 142

How The Mikado came to swing 145

Oriental blackness 152

Coda: The Black Face of US Imperialism 164

Notes 169

Bibliography 197

Index 207