Search results for ""Author Josephine Lee""

Long before Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, long before Barthes explicated his empire of signs, even before Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado presented its own distinctive version of Japan. Set in a fictional town called Titipu and populated by characters named Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, and Pooh-Bah, the opera has remained popular since its premiere in 1885. Tracing the history of The Mikado’s performances from Victorian times to the present, Josephine Lee reveals the continuing viability of the play’s surprisingly complex racial dynamics as they have been adapted to different times and settings. Lee connects yellowface performance to blackface minstrelsy, showing how productions of the 1938–39 Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado, among others, were used to promote African American racial uplift. She also looks at a host of contemporary productions and adaptations, including Mike Leigh’s film Topsy-Turvy and performances of The Mikado in Japan, to reflect on anxieties about race as they are articulated through new visions of the town of Titipu. The Mikado creates racial fantasies, draws audience members into them, and deftly weaves them into cultural memory. For countless people who had never been to Japan, The Mikado served as the basis for imagining what “Japanese” was.

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While most discussions of race in American theater emphasize the representation of race mainly in terms of character, plot, and action, Race in American Musical Theater highlights elements of theatrical production and reception that are particular to musical theater. Examining how race functions through the recurrence of particular racial stereotypes and storylines, this introductory volume also looks at casting practices, the history of the chorus line, and the popularity of recent shows such as Hamilton. Moving from key examples such as Show Boat! and South Pacific through to all-Black musicals such as Dreamgirls, Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk, and Jelly’s Last Jam, this concise study serves as a critical survey of how race is presented in the American musical theater canon. Providing readers with historical background, a range of case studies and models of critical analysis, this foundational book prompts questions from how stereotypes persist to “who tells your story?”

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In this book, Josephine Lee looks at the intertwined racial representations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American theater. In minstrelsy, melodrama, vaudeville, and musicals, both white and African American performers enacted blackface characterizations alongside oriental stereotypes of opulence and deception, comic servitude, and exotic sexuality. Lee shows how blackface types were often associated with working-class masculinity and the development of a nativist white racial identity for European immigrants, while the oriental marked what was culturally coded as foreign, feminized, and ornamental. These conflicting racial connotations were often intermingled in actual stage performance, as stage productions contrasted nostalgic characterizations of plantation slavery with the figures of the despotic sultan, the seductive dancing girl, and the comic Chinese laundryman. African American performers also performed common oriental themes and characterizations, repurposing them for their own commentary on Black racial progress and aspiration. The juxtaposition of orientalism and black figuration became standard fare for American theatergoers at a historical moment in which the color line was rigidly policed. These interlocking cross-racial impersonations offer fascinating insights into habits of racial representation both inside and outside the theater.

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At a time when Asian American theater is enjoying a measure of growth and success, Josephine Lee tells us about the complex social and political issues depicted by Asian American playwrights. By looking at performances and dramatic texts, Lee argues that playwrights produce a different conception of \u0022Asian America\u0022 in accordance with their unique set of sensibilities. For instance, some Asian American playwrights critique the separation of issues of race and ethnicity from those of economics and class, or they see ethnic identity as a voluntary choice of lifestyle rather than an impetus for concerted political action. Others deal with the problem of cultural stereotypes and how to reappropriate their power. Lee is attuned to the complexities and contradictions of such performances, and her trenchant thinking about the criticisms lobbed at Asian American playwrights -- for their choices in form, perpetuation of stereotype, or apparent sexism or homophobia -- leads her to question how the presentation of Asian American identity in the theater parallels problems and possibilities of identity offstage as well. Discussed are better-known plays such as Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, and Velina Hasu Houston's Tea, and new works like Jeannie Barroga's Walls and Wakako Yamauchi's 12-1-a.

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Asian American plays from the heartland

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An interdisciplinary reexamination of a fragmented history

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Asian American plays from the heartland

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