Joshua Chambers-Letson - Böcker

Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher EducationTaking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.

Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Association for Theatre in Higher EducationTaking a performance studies approach to understanding Asian American racial subjectivity, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson argues that the law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable identities in both popular aesthetic forms (such as theater, opera, or rock music) and in the rituals of everyday life. Tracing the production of Asian American selfhood from the era of Asian Exclusion through the Global War on Terror, A Race So Different explores the legal paradox whereby U.S. law apprehends the Asian American body as simultaneously excluded from and included within the national body politic. Bringing together broadly defined forms of performance, from artistic works such as Madame Butterfly to the Supreme Court's oral arguments in the Cambodian American deportation cases of the twenty-first century, this book invites conversation about how Asian American performance uses the stage to document, interrogate, and complicate the processes of racialization in U.S. law. Through his impressive use of a rich legal and cultural archive, Chambers-Letson articulates a robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.

"Some playwrights have a gift to amuse; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has a darker gift. Anyone with romantic notions of Chinese culture will be unsettled by the jagged, unsentimental portrait of modern urban China."(Chicago Reader) Poetic and devastating, sensuous and politically acute, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Plays explore the forces of global capital as they explode within the lives of everyday people in contemporary China. This volume collects together the three plays in the series, including Cowhig’s exploration of the human cost of development in China’s socialist market economy (The World of Extreme Happiness), of justice and revenge amidst ecological and economic catastrophe (Snow in Midsummer), and the tale of the trade in blood that brought the AIDS crisis to rural China (The King of Hell’s Palace). In addition to Cowhig’s plays, the volume includes a host of supplemental materials including an editorial preface and three (previously published) brief essays responding to each play by the editor, Joshua Chambers-Letson; a new introduction by theatre/performance scholar and dramaturg Christine Mok that explores the key themes in Cowhig’s body of work; a summary discussion between Cowhig, Chambers-Letson, and Mok, on Cowhig’s process and the political and aesthetic currents animating her work.The World of Extreme Happiness: "Fearless, zippily-paced, and satirical . . . Cowhig forces us down the long hard look path" (Independent) Snow in Midsummer: “Gripping and affecting… graceful and impassioned” (Times) The King of Hell's Palace: "A medical-scandal drama that we can't afford to ignore" (Telegraph)

The Sense of Brown is JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, MuÑoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer JosÉ Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what MuÑoz calls the brown commons-a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, MuÑoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

The Sense of Brown is JosÉ Esteban MuÑoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, MuÑoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer JosÉ Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what MuÑoz calls the brown commons-a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, MuÑoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher EducationWinner, 2018 Errol Hill Award in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, presented by the American Society for Theatre ResearchA new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking. After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, and Nona Faustine, After the Party considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance's capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference. Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, Chambers-Letson argues that it is through minoritarian performance that we keep our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive an increasingly precarious present.

Takes up the work of artists and theorists who ask what happens when we learn to linger, dwell, live, and work with queer griefWhat if, instead of overcoming grief, we learned to live with it? Unfinished Grief invites readers to linger within loss and to understand mourning not as an endpoint, but as a mode of relation, continuance, and care.In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson turns toward the art and theory of grief as a way of imagining queer survival. Drawing from queer of color critique, performance studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies, Chambers-Letson explores how love and loss are inseparable conditions of queer life. Engaging artists including Yoko Ono, Gertrude Stein, Bimbola Akinbola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joshua Rains, and Kia LaBeija, he considers the lessons art and performance teach about living with what remains unfinished.Set against the backdrop of public and private catastrophe, from war and pandemics to the ravages of racial capitalism, Unfinished Grief insists that mourning and political struggle are entwined practices. Through sensuous, reflective prose and a deeply personal critical voice, Chambers-Letson reveals how grief can be both a sustaining and shattering site of vulnerability, creativity, and communal becoming. Intimate, meditative, and defiantly alive, Unfinished Grief reflects on the queer art of mourning in this guide to the beautiful, difficult work of staying with loss and finding life within it.

Takes up the work of artists and theorists who ask what happens when we learn to linger, dwell, live, and work with queer griefWhat if, instead of overcoming grief, we learned to live with it? Unfinished Grief invites readers to linger within loss and to understand mourning not as an endpoint, but as a mode of relation, continuance, and care.In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson turns toward the art and theory of grief as a way of imagining queer survival. Drawing from queer of color critique, performance studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies, Chambers-Letson explores how love and loss are inseparable conditions of queer life. Engaging artists including Yoko Ono, Gertrude Stein, Bimbola Akinbola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joshua Rains, and Kia LaBeija, he considers the lessons art and performance teach about living with what remains unfinished.Set against the backdrop of public and private catastrophe, from war and pandemics to the ravages of racial capitalism, Unfinished Grief insists that mourning and political struggle are entwined practices. Through sensuous, reflective prose and a deeply personal critical voice, Chambers-Letson reveals how grief can be both a sustaining and shattering site of vulnerability, creativity, and communal becoming. Intimate, meditative, and defiantly alive, Unfinished Grief reflects on the queer art of mourning in this guide to the beautiful, difficult work of staying with loss and finding life within it.