Abstract
This essay offers a detailed analysis of playwright and director Young Jean Lee’s theatrical production Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, which premiered in 2006 at HERE Arts Center in New York City, in relationship to J. L. Austin’s concept of “performatives” introduced in his 1955 lectures at Harvard University and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the “periperformative.” This analysis attends to the play’s engagement with self-alienation, a sense of failure, and enacting whiteness in the absence of white persons and reveals that the falling away of certain conventions of ethnicity in the play alludes to the limits of the subject formation without enclosing a specific group within the established perception of epistemic categories. The appearance of ethnicity characterized as infelicitous in the play offers a new way to think, “How do those who feel a distance from dominant culture move around that culture in the contemporary United States?”
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