Feeling Yellow: Responding to Contemporary Yellowface in Musical Performance

Abstract

When encountering non-Asians masquerading as Asians in yellowface in twenty-first-century stage musical performances, I feel righteously angry, profoundly sad, and racially alienated. Yet musical theatre promises pleasure and enables the disavowal of complicity with systemic racist violence, as patrons, performers, and producers use their enjoyment to rationalize racial hierarchy. How does racial identity shape reactions to musicals? In turn, how do these reactions shore up and take down structural racism? This article theorizes "feeling yellow," how Asian Americans are moved and made in response to representation. Though grounded in racial inequality and difference, feeling yellow ultimately wields the potential to generate new pleasures by using feminist, queer of color critique to redistribute misery and form communities of fellow feeling.

Revolting Self-Care: Mark Aguhar's Virtual Separatism

“…They are performances of self-sustainment that seek, in the theater scholar Donatella Galella's stunning formulation, "to redistribute misery and form communities of fellow feeling." 34 In my attempt to consider the performance of a parrēsiastic callout, I am inclined to follow a path less traveled in the field of performance studies. Foucault distinguishes parrēsia from classic performance studies analytics such as John Searle's "speech act" and J. L. Austin's "performative."…”

An Intimacy Choreography for Sexual Justice: Considering Racism and Ableism as Forms of Sexual Violence

“…Many scholars document the connection between this cultural form and racial violence, from the ways black performance was used to uphold slavery, 26 to the links between minstrelsy's stock characters and pornotroping, 27 to performance's role in the colonial imaginaries and their attendant genocidal projects against indigenous people, 28 to the representational and symbolic violences of yellowface onstage. 29 These connections are so clear they have been the subject of artistic productions themselves, such as Alice Childress's play Trouble in Mind (2000), and Jackie Sibblies Drury's (2018). US theatre and performance have a long history as sites of racialized sexual violence, and as such theatrical representation itself can raise traumas for performers.…”