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Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. InThe Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body's uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim's study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday,The Racial Mundaneinvites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.

During the era of Chinese exclusion from U.S. immigration in the early twentieth century, a play that purportedly offered an authentic replication of Chinese drama became heralded as an important and innovative American contribution to the development of modern theatre. This essay examines Harry Benrimo and George Hazelton Jr.'s The Yellow Jacket, which opened on Broadway in 1912, and its strange career from ethnographic amusement to globetrotting masterpiece. It argues that the play benefited from the convergence of contemporary anxieties about the lack of a strong American dramatic tradition vis-à-vis Europe and shifting conceptions of assimilable and unassimilable difference vis-à-vis China. The essay further suggests that the play was able to accommodate such contradictory assessments of its significance, because it assumed an explicitly alienated perspective of the theatre it claimed to imitate. By encouraging its audience both to see the Chinese and see as the Chinese, the play allowed spectators, as well as the \"yellowface\" performers, to enact a partial crossing of racial boundaries.

This article examines the drama You for Me for You, which was produced in Washington, D.C., Boston, London, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seoul between 2012 and 2017. The play's depiction of sisters separated while leaving North Korea joins a story of Korean American immigration with that of North Korean defection. After discussing patterns in representations of North Korea that have recently circulated in the United States, the article traces changes made across productions to argue that the play, in revision, illuminates how different modes of relating Korean America to North Korea forward distinct conceptions of intervention and care.

Staged by East West Players in 1977, Wakako Yamauchi's And the Soul Shall Dance became one of the company's most successful and critically acclaimed productions. The drama launched Yamauchi's career as a playwright and helped East West Players (EWP) develop a strong audience base in the Japanese American community in southern California. Set in the 1930s in California's Imperial Valley, the play opens with the Japanese American Murata family surveying the damage caused by the accidental burning of their bathhouse. When the father (referred to only as “Murata” in the play) suggests that they might simply use the tub standing in the midst of razed walls, his wife Hana protests, “Everyone in the country can see us!” Murata quickly dismisses her concerns: “Who? Who'll see us? You think everyone in the country waits to watch us take a bath?” (157). Hana's uneasiness nevertheless injects a fear of scrutiny into the first scene of the play and turns those in the audience into the voyeurs whom she fears.

Six months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling inBrown v. Board of EducationoverturnedPlessy v. Fergusonand its doctrine of “separate but equal,” an article in the November 20, 1954, edition of theSaturday EveningPost announced the successful integration of Japanese “war brides” who had ostensibly vanished into American society after immigrating as wives of U.S. servicemen (Figure 2.1). The story’s title, which asks, “Where Are Those Japanese War Brides?” encapsulates its tone of curiosity and surprise. According to the writer, William L. Worden, many of the women had assimilated into neighborhoods scattered throughout the country and

What the article identifies as modern is the recognition of a Western audience, rather than a performance that explicitly incorporates Western aesthetic conventions, styles, or narratives. [...]while allowing the Chinese theaters their own modernism, the article nevertheless insists that they respect \"Occidental patronage.\" \"49 The shifting of audiences and their active relationship to the staged presentation-the very aspects Lynn identifies as \"intolerable\" to Western spectators in overt form-were, in a broader sense, crucial to developing performances that responded adeptly to modernity's asymmetrical distributions of cultural and political influence.