Guest Editor's Introduction: Asian American Performances and a World of Differences

Abstract

Writing about the multimedia performances of Dan Kwong, Chinese Japanese American artist, Robert Vorlicky suggests the position of centrality is one that might be reimagined through Asian American performance. Even as the Asian American body can be recentered on stage in an effort to respond to history of exclusion and misrepresentation, when it occupies that space performatively, it has the potential to make visible the dynamics that produce centrality in the first place: The performer soon realizes that the central position can be deceiving one. While it reveals insights, it also demonstrates that many centers co-exist at any given moment. Stories overlap, histories collide, identities blur--no one story can capture it all. For there is no all, after all. The best one can do is to tell his or her own story, to experience--however briefly--the centrality of that phenomenon and be aware, ever so vigilantly, that multiple stories with their fluid loci co-exist alongside one's own. In the United States, the floating centers that characterize one's multiple stories, and those of others, are among the most vivid manifestations of living democracy. (74) Rather than replacing one locus of power and visibility with another, the Asian American body in can highlight the existence of many centers, many stories, and many possible enactments. This special issue testifies to the diversity of positions Vorlicky evokes. In so doing, it highlights variegated Asian American performances in order to suggest the richness of field of study worthy of further attention. In Performance in America: Contemporary U. S. Culture anal the Performing Arts, David Romfin laments the relative lack of attention paid to drama and in American Studies. According to Roman, notwithstanding the popularity of performance metaphors--borrowings that denote little interest in the fields themselves except for ... [their] language (24)--scholarly invocations of tropes ironically evince performance's peripherality, which often manifests as a tradition of critical self-consciousness and anxiety (30). Such paradoxical attentive inattention might be characterized as commonplace in the field. However, Diana Taylor suggests that perhaps the term itself, rather than devaluing the field's practices per se, makes so elusive that [i]ts very undefinability and complexity.., carries the possibilities of challenge, even self-challenge within it, precisely because it simultaneously connot[es] process, praxis, an episteme, mode of transmission, an accomplishment, and means of intervening in the world (15). Reading Roman's assessment of the field in relation to Taylor's definitions of and Vorlicky's sense of the counter-intuitive possibilities of centering the Asian American body in performance, I suggest that the oscillation between centrality and peripherality, visibility and invisibility, popularity and inscrutability--a movement that constitutes the grounds of Asian American performances that always exist both within and outside of mainstream tradition--generates enormous critical energy. Such critical energy manifests in variety of ways, as the wide-ranging subjects covered in this special issue attest. Perhaps some of the most visible Asian American performers are those who have been working in art, that contested, multiply defined field whose foregrounding of the conceptual in conjunction with the body-in-performance has lent itself as readily to college campus tours as to theatrical and gallery exhibition. Korean American conceptual and artist Michael Joo's three-decade career has been preoccupied with (re)figuring the ways Asian American bodies constitute and challenge Western narratives of national progress. Joo's provocative performances draw our attention to the material elements--salt, sweat, urine--that make up and are excreted by the body. …