About Face: Performing ”Race” in Fashion and Theater

From the runways of Paris to the casting controversies over BMiss Saigon, from a local demonstration at the Claremont Colleges in California to the gender-blending of BM. Butterfly, BAbout Face examines representations of Asia and their reverberations in both Asia and Asian American lives. Japanese high fashion and Asian American theater become points of entry into the politics of pleasure, the performance of racial identities, and the possibility of political intervention in commodity capitalism. Based on Kondo’s fieldwork, this interdisciplinary work brings together essays, interviews with designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and playwright David Henry Hwang, and ＂personal＂ vignettes in its exploration of counter-Orientalisms.

Dorinne Kondo is an anthropologist and feminist scholar at Pomona College, and the author of Crafting Ourselves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a JapaneseWorkplace. She was a dramaturge on the world premiere of Anna Deavere Smith’s play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was represented as a character in Twilight at the New York Shakespeare festivala and at the Cort Theater on Broadway. She is also an aspiring playwright.