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- 225 NOTES Introduction 1. See Renny Christopher, The Viet Nam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); and Michael Anderegg, ed., Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Both authors discuss the way in which the American public’s unfamiliarity with the complex politics of the Vietnam War, coupled with Hollywood representations of the war, manipulated the public’s desire to conflate all Vietnamese people with the enemy North Vietnamese army. The arrival of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants after the fall of Saigon in 1975 posed an ideological problem for an American public hostile to Asian immigration , particularly that of Asians recently depicted as ‘‘the enemy.’’ 2. Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 24. 3. It is true that the bulk of publications in these fields are biographical. Within the field of Asian American studies, there is a lack of biographical writings about writers and artists in general. Biographical studies in dance tend to identify individual artists and their artistic legacies. Asian American literary studies challenges modernist notions of artistic achievement. Josephine Lee follows this literary approach and resists the reinscription of an Asian American theater canon by refusing to engage in a discussion of the artistic merits of individual plays. She writes, ‘‘I purposefully avoid any attempts to create an alternative canon, to rank the individual masterpiece, or to assess the excellence of any writer.’’ She does this to avoid placing on any one piece the ‘‘burden of representation,’’ in which individual Asian American writers are held responsible to represent the entirety of the Asian American experience. See Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America, 6–7. 4. Ping Chong and Muna Tseng, ‘‘SlutForArt,’’ in Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage, ed. Alvin Eng (New York: Asian American Writers Workshop , 1999), 378–405. 5. Maura Donohue, ‘‘When You’re Old Enough,’’ in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Tran, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi (New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1998), 108. 6. Chong and Tseng, ‘‘SlutForArt,’’ 384. 7. Susan Foster, ‘‘Choreographing History: A Manifesto for Dead and Moving 226 - Notes to Pages 5–14 Bodies,’’ in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 3. 8. Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (New York: Routledge, 1997), 20. 9. Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zäire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 11. 10. Richard Dyer, ‘‘The Role of Stereotypes,’’ in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1. 11. See Christopher, The Viet Nam War; Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam; and n. 1. 12. See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), for a complete discussion of anti-Asian immigration legislation and the formation of the Asian American subject as a perpetual foreigner. 13. Ibid., 91. 14. See Martin Manalansan IV’s critique of fusion cuisine as the new Orientalism and the ways in which Asian Americans are racialized through discourses of containment and consumption of ‘‘ethnic food’’: ‘‘Cooking up the Senses: A Critical Embodied Approach to the Study of Food and Asian American Television Audiences,’’ in Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in America, ed. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007): 179–93. 15. Johannes Fabian, ‘‘Presence and Representation (1990),’’ in Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays 1971–1991 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1991), 207. 16. Ibid., 209. 17. Ibid. 18. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 233. 19. James S. Moy, Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 39. 20. Said, Orientalism, 6. 21. See Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts Across Culture (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2005), for a history of yoga’s introduction to the West and an analysis of yoga as a global industry. 22. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a case in point, as is the racial profiling of Muslims and Arab Americans after September 11, 2001. 23. See Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘‘General Introduction: A Woman-Centered Perspective on Asian American History,’’ in Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and about Asian American Women, ed. Asian Women United of California (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 13; Deborah...