About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater - Softcover

Kondo, Dorinne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415911419 ISBN 13: 9780415911412

Publisher: Routledge, 1997

Synopsis

From the runways of Paris to the casting controversies over BMiss Saigon, from a local demonstration at the Claremont Colleges in California to the gender-blending of BM. Butterfly, BAbout Face examines representations of Asia and their reverberations in both Asia and Asian American lives. Japanese high fashion and Asian American theater become points of entry into the politics of pleasure, the performance of racial identities, and the possibility of political intervention in commodity capitalism. Based on Kondo's fieldwork, this interdisciplinary work brings together essays, interviews with designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and playwright David Henry Hwang, and "personal" vignettes in its exploration of counter-Orientalisms.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

From Paris to Broadway, from Rising Sun to Miss Saigon, from high fashion to local college protests, Dorinne Kondo's About Face examines performances of race: the processes of racialization in the fashion and theater worlds, and the ways representations of Asia in Western popular culture reverberate in Asian and Asian American lives. About Face offers a dynamic, new vision of cultural politics: the politics of pleasure, the possibilities of subverting Orientalisms, and the continually emerging challenges to conventional definitions of race, gender, and nation.

About the Author:

Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist and feminist scholar at Pomona College, and the author of Crafting Ourselves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. She was a dramaturge on the world premiere of Anna Deavere Smith's play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was represented as a character in Twilight at the New York Shakespeare festivala and at the Cort Theater on Broadway. She is also an aspiring playwright.

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0415911419
• ISBN 13: 9780415911412
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296