CALL FOR PAPER

Asian American Performance, Dance, and Theatre History : A Critical Reader

Edited by Esther Kim Lee, Ron West, and Yutian Wong

The anthology aims to bring together representative essays on Asian American performance, dance, and theatre. As the first of its kind, the collection will provide both a historical background and a critical assessment of the field. The co-editors invite essays that investigate how performance has extended the cultural landscape of Asian America. We encourage explorations beyond general rubrics, particularly as they may include intersections of gender, ethnicity, and multi-racial identities. Likewise, we urge responses from critical approaches that may span extend beyond the U.S. Though one goal of this project is to highlight the ways in which Asian American performance transcends boundaries, it also may be useful to chart the limits and changes to those borderlines, as recorded and instigated by the various performance forms. Rather than pose real or hypothetical categories and
topics, we welcome proposals for papers that will articulate the Asian American experience through, with, and from performance. We would like to showcase works that provide historical understanding, theoretical clarification, aesthetic analysis, and political illumination. The collection will encompass dance, movement, theatre, and music in the performance field and explore their increasing roles in the production of Asian American identity and subjectivity. The combined result will offer a critical reader to serve as an introductory compilation and to provide a significant resource for researchers.

Deadline for proposals (250 words): October 1, 2011. Please email the abstracts to Asian.American.Performance@gmail.com. The subject line should contain the writer’s surname followed by CR Abstract. If an abstract is selected for the anthology, the full essay will be due by April 1, 2012.