Abstract
In this roundtable held at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in 2021, the participants discussed the racialized politics of citation in musical theatre studies. Some of the speakers lifted up anti-racist scholarly pieces that have significantly shaped their work: SAJ considered Douglas Jones Jr’s chapter ‘Slavery, performance, and the design of African American theatre’, Jordan Ealey shared lessons from Matthew D. Morrison’s article ‘The sound(s) of subjection: Constructing American popular music and racial identity through Blacksound’ Masi Asare expanded upon Fred Moten’s essay ‘Taste, dissonance, flavor, escape’ to think through sweeping away and stealing away, Donatella Galella applied Karen Shimakawa’s book National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage to contemporary yellowface, and Hye Won Kim talked about the influence of Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s book The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene on her own work. Morrison, Moten, Shimakawa and Shimizu reflected on why they wrote those pieces of scholarship and how they understand their research years later. Finally, the co-authors spoke to reasons why scholars situated in musical theatre studies have so rarely cited research in fields like Black and Asian American performance studies and imagined radical possibilities beyond a racist citation framework.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 53-76 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | Studies in Musical Theatre |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2022 |
Funding
My essay ‘The bind of representation’ and my book The Hypersexuality of Race are about claiming boldly what sexualities may seem dangerous to you when actually we need to centre our own pleasures and our own freedoms. I really wanted to take that seriously: what does it mean to be free, what does it mean to centre your own pleasure, including its performance on stage as authored by Asian American women actors doing what they can within their assigned roles, to claim sexualities that are condemned and say this is what makes me feel good, so to claim the contradictions and subject formation within hypersexuality attributed to us. And half the book is about pornography. And this was my first book. I did not have tenure. I was funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation, and I hung out at the Kinsey Institute for Sex and Gender Research in Indiana for a few years over the summer watching pornography for weeks at a time. I really wanted to understand what is this projection of perverse sexuality that’s deemed natural to Asian women that they perform particular sexual acts, that they are biologically structured in a certain way. The funding helped to do this work deemed dangerous and infecting as a kind of sex work in the academy.
Keywords
- anti-racism
- Asian American musical
- Black musical theatre
- Blacksound
- citation
- escape-in-confinement
- hypersexuality of race
- national abjection
- theatre
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Visual Arts and Performing Arts
- Music
- Literature and Literary Theory
