Dancing in the rain

Abstract

Worldmaking is a genre-bending ethnographic/theoretical analysis of labor and race-making in the US theater industry, grounded in Kondo’s full participation in theater as anthropologist, performance studies scholar, dramaturg and playwright. The narrative trajectory toward what Kondo calls “reparative creativity,” inspired by Kleinian theory and its appropriations in queer of color critique, grounds her analysis of the work of artists of color Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and her own full-length play. She disrupts the theory/ practice binary by spotlighting creative labor and race-making, and destabilizes the personal/structural divide through her concepts of “racial affect” and “affective violence.” Theater and the arts are more than second-order representation; they are zones of public existence. Kondo locates shared themes of destruction/creation, genre-bending, and embodiment/ affect/ movement as she “dances in the rain” with her interlocutors Joshua Chambers-Letson and Aimee Cox.