@article{ART002219434},
author={Moonyoung Chung},
title={Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces},
journal={Journal of Modern English Drama},
issn={1226-3397},
year={2017},
volume={30},
number={1},
pages={89-120}
TY - JOUR
AU - Moonyoung Chung
TI - Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces
JO - Journal of Modern English Drama
PY - 2017
VL - 30
IS - 1
PB - 한국현대영미드라마학회
SP - 89
EP - 120
SN - 1226-3397
AB - This paper examines changing views on racial identity and sexual identity politics in Asian American plays, David Henry Hwang’s Face Value (1993) and Yellow Face (2007), Julia Cho’s BFE (2005) produced in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The failure of Face Value, a farce about mistaken racial identity provides Hwang with an opportunity to dismantle his face as a public face which represents one of the most successful model minority Asian Americans brought upon him with the great success of his M. Butterfly (1988). And the changing ethnoscape of intercultural American society in the 1990s also makes Hwang face the landscape of a deterritorialized world and look for his and Asian American’s new face. With Yellow Face he achieves his satiric atonement for his foolish performance as a public face and a model minority, by using a self-humiliation strategy of making himself as the most foolish person in the play. With this play he is ready to confront, know, and dismantle the face and faciality and finally to find a line of flight.
Hwang, as the representative second-Asian American playwright, has concentrated on making invisible minor Asian Americans visible on the public space. But the third-generation leading Korean American woman playwright, Julia Cho is more concerned with dealing with invisible Fwinkie’s experiences of loss and isolation and their resistance against being assimilated into the mainstream of American society. And Julia Cho is more concerned with abjection of Asian woman’s body, while Hwang exploits Asian woman’s body as Asian cultural marks in subverting racial identity, because Hwang’s main concern is racial identity politics. Julia Cho uses the strategy of abjection for the spectator’s paradoxical recognition of Asian American woman’s face and body on which the word of “ugly” is inscribed by white Americans and its relation to national abjection. This paper attempts to draw a changing topographic map by reading three plays of the representative second-generation and third-generation Asian American playwrights in terms of searching for Asian Americans’ new faces.
KW - Asian American drama;racial identity;gender identity;identity politics;yellow face;faciality;abjection
DO -
UR -
ER -
Moonyoung Chung. (2017). Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces. Journal of Modern English Drama, 30(1), 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. 2017, "Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces", Journal of Modern English Drama, vol.30, no.1 pp.89-120.
Moonyoung Chung "Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces" Journal of Modern English Drama 30.1 pp.89-120 (2017) : 89.
Moonyoung Chung. Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces. 2017; 30(1), 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. "Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces" Journal of Modern English Drama 30, no.1 (2017) : 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces. Journal of Modern English Drama, 30(1), 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces. Journal of Modern English Drama. 2017; 30(1) 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces. 2017; 30(1), 89-120.
Moonyoung Chung. "Race and Gender on Asian American Stage: Asian American’s Searching for New Faces" Journal of Modern English Drama 30, no.1 (2017) : 89-120.
