Stanford Drama

In Racing Modernity, I use modern performance in the period between the two World Wars (1914-1939) to investigate the relationship between Orientalism, primitivism, and whiteness: what modern performance tells us about the formation of "whiteness," and how conceptions of whiteness are tied to racialized processes of national self-definition and belonging. Within both popular and high-art performance practices of the early twentieth century, white subjectivity was ordered by primitivist notions of "natural" corporeality on one hand, and by Orientalist conceptions of corporeal discipline and spiritual transcendence on the other. This triangular racial geometry not only formed notions of individual subjectivity for white artists and audiences, but also created the foundation for nationalist self-conception in the years between the World Wars. Across a wide range of events—from Michio Ito's Eurhythmics-influenced dance in W. B. Yeats's Noh fantasy At the Hawk's Well to the early performances of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, from Chinatown tourism to anthropological fantasies of the Pacific, from Mei Lanfang's 1930 tour of the U.S. to the Federal Theater Project's swing adaptation of The Mikado with a black cast—modernist performance entwined fantasies of Asian and African bodies and used these racialized conceptions to negotiate shifting and unstable categories of whiteness that were themselves precariously underpinned by complex negotiations of national identity.

The project has two major components: the first, a theoretical inquiry into the black-white binary systems that typicallly characterize discussions of "race," nation-formation, and modernity; and second, a historical investigation into how American geopolitical ascendance in the first half of the twentieth century was dependent on its cultural, economic, and phantasmic investments in Asia. Building on theories of the"Black Atlantic," I probe how confrontations between notions of national and racial identity in these performances relied on the global movement of cultural capital across both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Modernist performance functioned as a quintessential arena through which the processes of cultural capital, global industrialization, and corporeal regimentation on which race and modernity depended were worked out.