About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater

✍ Scribed by Dorinne Kondo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 296
• Category: Library

✦ 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Vignette......Page 14
Introduction......Page 20
1 The Politics of Pleasure......Page 22
Part One: Orientalisms......Page 48
2 M. Butterfly: Gender, Orientalism, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity......Page 50
3 Orientalizing: Fashioning Japan......Page 74
Part Two: Consumimg Gender, Race and Nation......Page 120
Vignette......Page 122
4 The Limits of the Avant-Garde? Gender and Race on the Runway......Page 124
Vignette......Page 174
5 Fabricating Masculinity: Gender, Race, and Nation in the Transnational Circuit......Page 176
Part Three: Strategies of Intervention......Page 206
6 The Narrative Production of Home in Asian American Theater......Page 208
7 Interview with David Henry Hwang......Page 230
8 Art, Activism, Asia, Asian Americans......Page 246
References cited......Page 280
Index......Page 290