Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage by Josephine Lee (review)

558 Book Reviews us that our anthologies, and probably our syllabi as well, do small justice to the variety and quality of work produced alongside better-known movements and texts. In this sense; Wainscott's book is directed not so much at the emergence of what is commonly regarded as "modern American drama" as it is at what failed to emerge as representative of this category. At the same time, the book, by its presentation of such marginal work, allows us to question the category itself. MICHAEL VANDEN HEUVEL, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON JOSEPHINE LEE. Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1997. Pp. viii, 241, illustrated. $34.95. "How are different ideas 'of what is Asian American inseparable from the interpretation of performance events?" asks Lee in this groundbreaking study of Asian American theatre, and "how do these plays work to construct race and ethnicity as theatrical values?" (6). At a time when Asian American identity is under radical re-organization due to shifts in immigration law as well as domestic and foreign policy, these are vexing questions to even ask, let alone answer. At that same time, however, Asian American theatre appears to be flourishing. This would seem, then, to be an ideal moment in which to consider issues of performance, race, and ethnicity as they specifically inform our understandings (past and present) of Asian American identity; and while James Moy's Marginal Sights; Staging the Chinese in America (1993) has made important contributions to this field by providing the context within and against which Asian American playwrights have positioned their works, Performing Asian America is the first book-length study to undertake this project. Peiforming Asian America makes significant strides in examining the intersections between dramatic art/theory and Asian American history/culture/ identity. One of the particularly useful aspects of this book is its organization: rather than follow the standard pattern for an inaugural literary study such as this by treating the plays chronologically or by ethnic/geographic groups, Lee organizes the chapters thematically, taking up various generic or methodological frameworks to offer mUltiple modes of performing, and being audience to, Asian Americanness. This multiplication of conceptualizations and perspectives is, in fact, an enactment of Lee's larger argument: that Asian American identity cannot be performed/interpreted according to a single rubric; and Asian American playwrights have long been aware, and made explicit use, of that mobility of identity. Chapter one provides much needed historical background, not only of the plays and theatre companies themselves but of Asian America more generally. Book Reviews 559 Lee traces not only the social history of Asian Americans (through changes in immigration and naturalization laws), but also the development of an Asian American identity per se, through the political activism of the Civil Rights movement and the current vogue of multiculturalism. (Importantly, here and elsewhere Lee is careful to include not only mainland Asian American history and plays, but also the perspectives, histories, and dramatic works of Hawaiian Asian Americans.) Chapter two takes on "the politics of realism," rethinking feminist and post-structuralist critiques of realism in the context of a marginalized literature: given that it remains a dominant mode of representation for Asian American playwrights Lee concludes, "we cannot simply dis-· miss dramatic realism," and argues that the question of spectatorship necessarily problematizes any such critique. Lee uses Frank Chin's Year of the Dragon and David Henry Hwang's Family Devotions to illustrate the potentially restorative value of realist representation which serves "viewers' needs to find themselves as whole" (60). Chapter three addresses the difficult question of Asian American masculinity as performed in Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman and R.A. Shiomi's Yellow Fever. Chin's work (along with that of other Asian American writers) has been singled out for its misogynist and homophobic tendencies, but rather than simply condemn such work, Lee employs psychoanalytic concepts to complicate her gender critique. Lee does not simply impose a conventional psychoanalytic reading on these plays - the "feminized" position of Asian American men in U.S. American culture, she argues, necessarily precludes such a simple substitution - nor does she use this framework to...