JADT Special Issue – Asian American Dramaturgies
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Special Issue: Asian American Dramaturgies
Spring 2022
Call for Submissions
“Dramaturgical critique deploys research, theory, and scholarship for reparative ends.”
– Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity
The American Theatre and Drama Society’s 2022 special issue of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre attends to the urgency of Asian Americanist critique in theatre and performance studies given the increased visibility of anti-Asian misogynist xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic. What can Asian American dramaturgies do? What can we do with Asian American dramaturgies? Instead of reducing racism to individual, exceptional, and newfound hate, Asian American dramaturgies invite us to investigate longer histories of violence from the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre in 1871 to yellowface today. They provide context for how performance has scripted structural inequalities from economic exploitation to health disparities and narratives from war and genocide to incarceration and deportation. They theorize Asian Americanness as a racial formation and political identity of pan-Asian solidarity. They seek and complicate communal joy in representation. And they imagine new worlds on stage and beyond the theatre.
This special issue on “Asian American Dramaturgies” calls for proposals to redress the dearth of scholarship on Asian American theatre and performance studies in JADT. Dramaturgs research history, interpret plays, analyze dramatic structure, ask questions, teach, feel deeply, collaborate, mediate, and advocate for others. In her book Worldmaking, Dorinne Kondo speaks to the reparative work that dramaturgs perform to raze systemic white supremacy and reinvigorate artists and audiences of color. Asian American dramaturgies do this care work toward anti-racist, liberatory possibilities.
Submissions may take up subjects such as:
- Histories of Asian American theatre institutions, playwrights, and performances from the Asian American Performers Action Coalition to Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s Draw the Circle
- Asian Americans in historically white U.S. regional theatres
- Asian Americanist archival practices
- Reflections on the foundation of Asian American theatre and performance studies by scholars like James S. Moy, Josephine Lee, and Esther Kim Lee, and the state of the field today
- Asian American artistic approaches
- Teaching Asian American drama from the classroom to student troupes
- Theories including Lisa Lowe’s immigrant acts, Karen Shimakawa’s national abjection, Lucy Burns’s puro arte, Ju Yon Kim’s racial mundane, and Iyko Day’s alien capital
- Asian American audiences and affects
- Casting (and not casting) Asian American actors
- Protests of yellowface, Orientalism, and anti-Asian racism
- Impact of COVID-19 on Asian American performances
- Solidarities with political movements including Black, trans, and queer abolition; Latinx workers’ and immigrants’ rights; Palestinian liberation; and Native decolonization
Inspired by the 2021 “Milestones in Black Theatre” JADT special issue edited by Nicole Hodges Persley and Heather Nathans, we welcome short submissions in a variety of formats rather than standard-length articles in order to include more voices and challenge the typical academic journal template. Authors may submit interviews, manifestos, dramaturgs’ notes, and short essays ranging from 800-2500 words as well as roundtables up to 5000 words in length.Manuscripts should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, use endnotes, and be submitted as an attachment in Microsoft Word format.
Authors do not need to be members of the American Theatre and Drama Society, but submissions from members are especially encouraged. For more information about ATDS and to join the Society, see www.atds.org.
Please direct submissions and questions to guest editor Donatella Galella at Galella@ucr.edu. The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2021.