The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama a Dissertation Submitted
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Race and Role: The Mixed-race Asian Experience in American Drama A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Theater Studies by Rena M. Heinrich Committee in charge: Professor Christina S. McMahon, Chair Professor Ninotchka Bennahum Professor Paul Spickard June 2018 The dissertation of Rena M. Heinrich is approved. ____________________________________________ Ninotchka Bennahum ____________________________________________ Paul Spickard ____________________________________________ Christina S. McMahon, Committee Chair June 2018 Race and Role: The Mixed-race Asian Experience in American Drama Copyright © 2018 by Rena M. Heinrich iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to my committee members Drs. Christina S. McMahon, Ninotchka Bennahum, and Paul Spickard for their endless support, crucial mentorship, enthusiastic cheerleading, and abundant wisdom. I thank the faculty, the staff, and my colleagues in the Department of Theater and Dance for their generosity of spirit and their unwavering belief in my endeavors. I am especially indebted to Blythe Foster, Ming Lauren Holden, Yasmine M. Jahanmir, Kelli Coleman Moore, Rachel Wolf, and Rebecca Wear for looking after my children and making it possible to do this work. I thank the Department of Asian American Studies—faculty, staff, and fellow teaching assistants for their kindness, support, and good cheer. I thank my colleagues in the Department of History for their many hours of caring feedback. I thank the following people and organizations for their generous contributions to this research and to my personal growth as a scholar: Aurora Adachi-Winter; Ellen Anderson; Ahmed Asi; Lynda and Jerry Baker; Hala Baki; Fay Beauchamp; Hiwa Bourne; Michael W. Butchers; Kirstin Candy; Christopher Chen; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig; Fanshen Cox; Robert Garcia; José Cruz González; Christopher Goodson; Brian Granger; Sarah Grant; Meredith Greenburg; Charls Hall; Sadakichi Hartmann; Nicole Michelle Haskins; Aaron J. Heinrich; Kimberly Kay Hoang; Christina Holdrem-Markulich; Velina Hasu Houston; Miglena Ivanova; Elizabeth Liang; Tanya Kane-Parry; Laura Kina; Hannah Kunert; SanSan Kwan; Anne E. McMills; Eric Mills; Justine Nakase; Laura Pancake; Lisa Sun-Hee Park; Scott Magelssen; Susan Mason; Michael Reyes; Jennifer Robbins; Lisa Schebetta-Jackson; Kara Leigh Severson; Daniel Smith; Lawrence D. Smith; iv Vance Smith; Vanessa Stalling; Kymm Swank; Mary Tench; Debra Vance; Marie-Reine Velez; Simon Williams; Kristina Wong; Annie Zamora; the entire cast and production team of the 2016 Chicago production of Mutt, Department of Special Research Collections at University of California, Santa Barbara; Japan Studies Association; Red Tape Theatre; Special Collections and University Archives at University of California, Riverside; Stage Left Theatre; and the Transracial and Mixed-race working groups of the American Society of Theatre Research Annual Conferences, 2016 and 2017. I thank my parents Maria N. Lilagan and James A. Heinrich for their never-ending love and support. Finally, I am most grateful to my family: Roger, Paige, and Lillian Butchers without whom this journey would never have been possible. v VITA OF RENA M. HEINRICH March 2018 EDUCATION Doctor of Philosophy in Theater, Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara June 2018 Master of Arts in Theatre Arts and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles June 2012 Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts, Loyola Marymount University May 1994 PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS 2017-2018: Lecturer, School of Dramatic Arts, University of Southern California 2017-2018: Lecturer, Department of Theater and Dance, California State University, Los Angeles 2017: Teaching Associate, Department of Asian American Studies, UC Santa Barbara 2013-2017: Teaching Assistant, Departments of Asian American Studies and Theater and Dance, UC Santa Barbara PUBLICATIONS “The White Wilderness,” The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century, Edited by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials and Tara Betts, by 2LeafPress, 2017 “Half-Butterfly, Half-Caste: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Mixed-Japanese Drama, Osadda's Revenge,” Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity, Edited by Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, and Paul Spickard, by University of Nebraska Press, in press. AWARDS Michael D. Young Engaged Scholar Award, 2018 Graduate Opportunities Fellowship, 2017-2018 Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Graduate Affiliate Scholar, 2015-2016 FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: Mixed-race Studies in Theatrical Performance A joint field of study in Theater and Performance Studies with Drs. McMahon and Bennahum and History with Dr. Spickard vi ABSTRACT Race and Role: The Mixed-race Asian Experience in American Drama by Rena M. Heinrich Mixed-race subjects have long posed an invisible threat to the stability of racial categories in America. Given that racialization has influenced government policies since the country’s inception, the subordination of various ethnic groups based on their physiognomy has served to control non-white people deemed socially inferior while attempting to keep white bloodlines "pure." Influenced by the human "scientific" taxonomy proposed by Carrolus Linneaus and Johann Blumenbach, among others, Western hegemonic discourse has historically centered on the assumption that human beings are rightfully divided into different races, which places white Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and non-white people from various ethnic groups scattered among the different classes below. This social stratification also functions through the belief in naturalized hypodescent, which forces mixed-race people to identify as monoracials, who are only able to claim their non-white parentage. Evelyn Alsultany calls this structure of racialization a “monoracial cultural logic” that dictates monoracial designations to the body politic. Imposed monoraciality has erased the majority of historical narratives about mixed- race people in the United States. The resulting lack of documentation seems to suggest that interracial marriages and their mixed-race offspring are anomalies in society, rare in previous generations, and only recently on the rise. In previous decades, however, social mores denounced interracial unions as impure and often erased them from the discourse. These vii silenced histories have been replaced by tropes in the social imaginary that depict mixed-race children as defective, deviant, and tragically trapped between two worlds. Nonetheless, Americans have been mixing and marrying individuals from other ethnic backgrounds for generations, and instances of interracial marriages have taken place in significant numbers between various ethnic groups. In this dissertation, I examine the experiences of mixed-race individuals with one Asian and one non-Asian parent as represented in performance, and I argue that one of the most critically important ways these mixed-Asian American histories have survived is through theatrical texts. These dramas elucidate the external social pressures and cultural limitations that have played a key role in the development of mixed-race identity. Further, plays written since the new millennium present mixed-race subjectivity in a different light, which, I assert, is due to the government’s formal acknowledgment of the mixed-race population on the 2000 United States census. As a result, the mixed-race narrative in theater has begun to shift from one of the tragic Eurasian to that of a wholly integrated identity, one who shape shifts to resist the rigidity of racial designations. This dissertation traces the depiction of mixed-race Amerasians in American theater from the late-nineteenth century to the new millennium and investigates a new canon of politically-charged mixed-race Asian American plays. Through archival research, ethnographic methods, and cultural materialist readings of theatrical texts and their performances, I suggest that an understanding of this “doubly liminal” hapa consciousness, constructed and embodied in a liminal space outside of monoracial binaries, is crucial for the examination of the mixed-Asian American stories. These narratives, when transformed into performance texts, can often dismantle the social and cultural assignments that are imposed viii upon mixed-race bodies. They complete a historical narrative that begins in the nineteenth century and delivers us to the present day—to an age in which a post-racial society remains ever elusive. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments [iv] Abstract [v] 1. Stages of Denial [1] Stage Management: The Construction of Race [6] Setting the Stage: Diverging from the Racial Paradigm [14] Stage Directions: Early Embodiments of Mixed-race Performance [31] Staging Presence: Mixed-race Dramas in America [39] 2. Tragic Eurasians: Mixed-Asian Dramas of the Late Nineteenth Century [44] The Art of Being in Between [52] Half-Butterfly, Half-Caste: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Mixed-Japanese Drama, Osadda's Revenge [54] The Most Affectionate Creature: The Mixed-race Body of Patsy O’Wang [82] 3. Hapa Identity in Mixed Dramatic Forms: The Work of Velina Hasu Houston [100] The Desire for Wholeness in Thirst [108] Kokoro (True Heart): Presence and Absence in the Mixed-race Dilemma [128] 4. Multiraciality in the Post-racial Era [148] Double Liminality and Racial Transgression [151] Sublime Superhapa: Optics, Representation, and the American Presidency