 is right and what I'll do first is introduce all three of our panelists beginning with Sabah Sarwar who is joining us via Skype and she is a writer and multidisciplinary artist and activist currently based in Houston hence Skype and she moves between the city of her birth Karachi Pakistan where she spent the first half of her life in a home filled with artists activists and educators and her adopted city of Houston where she has recreated a community similar to the one where she was raised her work tackles women's issues and displacement her writings have appeared in anthologies newspapers and magazines in Canada India Pakistan and the US her video and art installations have been exhibited in Pakistan Egypt India and the US and she has performed extensively around the US and Pakistan through voices breaking boundaries of grassroots art organization that she has co-founded 14 years ago and where she serves as artistic director she directs and creates new work for their living room art productions that are partially funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual arts and the NEA she has a recipient of three Houston Arts Alliance Creative Awards is a lifetime member of the Macondo Writers Workshop is listed on Texas Commission on the arts touring artist roster and she was honored by the Fatima Jena women's University in Islamabad in 2012 through 13 she serves as artists in residence for the Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and right here joining me is Chris Ang and he is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where his primary research interests include Asian-American studies critical ethnic studies and queer discourses at CUNY he is a co-organizer of the Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative and the Mentoring Future Faculty of Color Project Chris serves on the board of directors for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies where he chairs the programming committee his presentation today draws from his larger dissertation project which is entitled Dislocating Camps on State Power, Queer Aesthetics and Asian Americanist Critique and I'm Donatella Gallella I'm a doctoral candidate in theater at the Graduate Center and my dissertation is a critical history of arena stage the pioneering regional theater at Washington DC and its articulations of non-profit black and American identities and excerpts from two of my chapters are forthcoming in continuum the new African-American performance journal and in theater journal I currently teach at Eugene Lang College at the new school and I'm the dramaturg in residence for Leviathan Lab all right so that being said I wanted to thank everyone who has helped to organize Kata and especially Juliet for all of her amazing and patient organizing and shout out to hell around thanks all of you especially Vijay who used to be my co-worker at arena stage all right so I'm going to throw it to Sabah Sarwar and we're going to actually hear some comments from her and then watch a video of her TED talk and then I hear some additional comments from her before we move to the more formal papers by Chris and myself thank you introduction hi everybody I wish I could be there in person we tried very hard and everybody Juliet and everybody tried just very hard to make it happen it did not for different reasons including my mad schedule right now so I'm just very happy that I can be with you via Skype my project what is home emanated from a two-year residency at the Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and but truly the issues that I explored during my residency have percolated inside me for all my life actually whether in the US or Pakistan through the residency I've completed in first draft of an experimental memoir includes prose and poetry and I'm hoping to add images and the piece is called what is home same title and I'm now pushing the project into the public sphere through an installation exhibition that I'm planning for spring 2015 through another grant award and what you're about to see it's a talk that I gave last October for TEDx Houston and in this I talk about the issues that I grapple with every day as I confront the issues of what is home which is really what we are all talking about right now so with that I can answer questions I'll be I'll be available for the comments later and I look forward to what Chris and Donna tell I have to say what is home and how we address that issue in 2013 it's difficult to pin down one simple idea of home and how that word relates to memory art history and social justice as I work on a new manuscript about those subjects I find myself reflecting on how when I was growing up in Karachi Pakistan I had no idea what the world would be around me I did not know that I would have spent almost half my life right here in Houston Texas that I would be raising a bicultural binational child that I would be writing creating art and community my parents moved from India to Pakistan and at that time there was no it was all one country Pakistan was formed in 1947 there was a new border carved and they moved their families moved I was born in Karachi Pakistan and there I attended a British school where we studied all subjects in just English no indigenous languages barely any Urdu the language that my family used it was only later much later after reading textbooks that were passed down history that was taught to us from British textbooks was only later that I learned to challenge mainstream textbooks and form ideas for myself create community work on creating art production through which we could share our multiple truths in the meantime of course I didn't know this growing up in Karachi I didn't even know that a country such as a city such as Brownsville Texas even existed my husband was growing up was born in Brownsville Texas and he was growing up along the US Mexico border at that time he and his siblings could not speak Spanish were not allowed to speak Spanish in public schools he grew up without much fluency in Spanish a language that is claimed by the US Mexico border one that his family knows is there they call themselves Chicano Chicana trans border which is something that all of us are today of course if we think about it we cannot today have the time to talk about the world as it is framed by today's geopolitical borders we cannot talk about the indigenous languages the indigenous lands and cultures that have been lost we will save it just today and I will say that in some senses I'm glad that some things have changed since my husband and I were growing up today assimilation is no longer pushed personal narratives are appreciated as you have seen today from all of today's stories and there is a growing scientific research to prove that children's brains develop much faster if they are exposed to more languages at an early age together my husband and I are raising a nine year old Chicano Pakistani born right here in Houston Texas she speaks she is fluent in two languages Spanish and English has comprehension in a third or two one of the first things I did when she was born was to get her a passport and when she was eight months old she took a trip with us and since then she has made that 24 yes 24 sometimes 36 hour journey many many times over and I'm now in the process of getting her dual citizenship just as I have this past summer we were in Karachi again and I asked her would you like to live here sometime she was like sure that'll be cool I would get to spend more time with Nani and I'd make a lot more friends I knew exactly what she was talking about in Karachi she gets to have special time with my mother she adapts very quickly to the different schedule breakfast at 10 lunch at 2 dinner at 9 and a spate of guests rolling in through our house at all different hours for me you drink see whatever happens to be served at that time but she lacks same-age companionship that is something she has here in Houston which she has made through the public school that she attends but every morning when she reports to school she is greeted with not one but two pledges of allegiance that are broadcast over the school intercom often she is asked by a classmate to put her hand on her heart when I hear these stories from her I am struck by how much has changed since September 11 2001 I remember how at that time I was teaching in a Houston public school and in those days students did not have to say the pledge if they didn't wish to no Texas pledge was broadcast and students were not monitoring each other on patriotism of course when I was growing up in Karachi we had to learn the national anthem also but a lot of us joked about especially since the lyrics went Farsi version which we couldn't understand anyway but their nationalism is on the rise just as it is right here in the US and around the world there is more fear there is global violence war and nations are building war walls to protect from each other US against Mexico India against Bangladesh Israel against Palestine just to name a few nowadays I don't teach in the classroom that often mostly I learned from my daughter so when preparing for today's talk I was chatting with her and I asked her would you have liked it if I had married someone from the same country as myself and she said no that would be boring so I asked her to explain a little bit more and she said well I like coming from no having different histories I like having more homes I like being able to travel and learn about the world and then she looked at me in a very matter-of-fact way and said besides of me you're not from one country either your parents were born in India and she knows that when I was a child my mother took me across the border many times to visit my family's old homes to meet family on the other side what would the world look like today if we all together right here beginning in this room pledged allegiance to ending international poverty or providing equal education to all regardless of national borders what if we weren't thinking about me my country my neighborhood my city first and we remembered our roots before these new very new geopolitical borders were cut before we had to get passports to cross and ultimately what does the question of one home or a single allegiance have to do with social justice art and memory the idea of one home is an old idea can you imagine how boring Dorothy's life would have been if she'd never gone to us but somehow all of us in all of us there is that yearning for that special place home under the Gulmahore tree where my siblings cousins and I sat waiting for my father to pull up in the driveway in his mother after a morning of seeing patients and then we'd all get summoned into the dining room buried deep in the recesses of my old house of our old house and they're far from the city sounds of bus horns blaring paparapara or the city or the street vendor calling for recycled papers right the hour my grandmother calling scolding her maid I meet them say kahatana and her voice floats down from her balcony down to our backyard many of these sounds are still in Karachi our house has been torn down my grandmother has long since passed away what is home can anyone truly answer that question of home a romantic myth that some have let go of yet some of us hold on to as artists perhaps we have to hold on to home because home represents memory memory shapes our art and memory and home is our way of revisiting our history re-examining so we can find truth for ourselves on one such journey on one such quest to find truth I spent some time in Bangladesh this summer this past summer Bangladesh was once part of Pakistan I did not learn about Bangladesh in my history textbooks I did not learn about operation searchlight March 1971 which was launched by the Pakistani army that landed in Dhaka and arrested and killed hundreds and thousands of Bengali activists intellectuals that war went on for eight months many more atrocities rape killing death and there was silence in Pakistan and only a few brave souls artists poets activists had the courage to speak out that project has become that the research that I began there has become part of a larger project that I'm working on called borderlines borderlines makes connections between what has been happening in South Asia and the history to connections right here in Houston to neighborhoods such as near North side Gulfton the US Mexico border to pull out the stories to share them to ask questions like who does this story belong to who has the right to tell this story and what is the right layer there are so many layers to each story we find and so many amazing artists that I'm working with of pulling out these stories Jimmy Castile autumn night Robert Pruitt Habir Sandhu Monica Villarreal Oscar Sanan general Perez Verte Eric Hester have all contribute continue to contribute as our artists from India Pakistan Bangladesh and from the US Pakistan border and we will be sharing this with all of you all that we are learning we share with you over the coming year coming two years actually as artists we are the conscience of society if we let our memory lapse there is no history there is no passion there is no truth it's urgent that we share the truth about the world around us not as messages but as responses to the pain and joy we experience in the world many have blazed the path before us Fels and with Fels, Patty Smith, Mel Jin, Arundhati Roy just to name a few very few and now more than ever it is urgent for us to experience more of the globe than one single place so no one location is viewed as superior to another perhaps further down the road my daughter will create art to capture her experience of being in Karachi in December 2007 when Benazir Butto was assassinated in Raul Pindi 800 miles away and she will remember how the city and the country was burning and people died and how we had to spend the night at my friend Selma's house and we had to wait for the lull of morning prayer before we could be wished to my parents house just a few miles away why is it important that my daughter at age nine remember the name Benazir Butto or be with me when I go to cast one of my first votes at JP Henderson Elementary on this new street in Houston, Texas so she can ask questions like why are there no women presidents in this country why are all the streets named after men and who is that woman who climbs under the bridge under I-45 and where is she today now that her shopping cart is gone she could not ask these questions the part that my father my family and I have chosen is not always easy many of you who are choosing this path know what I'm talking about there's a high financial cost those journeys are our investment our college fund investment so she learns about more than just right here and there are bigger losses I was in Houston and my father passed away it took me two days to get back it took my daughter and me two days to get back to Karachi during which time the burial had already taken place and we were in Karachi last summer when someone close to us was diagnosed with a form of cancer and we had to scramble to get back in time for surgery being in the middle means I'm constantly comparing spaces when people mention poverty I say where when there's talk of education or women's rights I'm wondering about the population under discussion and ultimately I do know that if more people had families living in Sarayud Sarayevo Addis Ababa Dhaka Bangkok or Karachi we would not condone drone attacks so easily sometimes when my daughter has conflicts with friends I invite her to sit down and do what we are doing today to listen and to share her truth there is no guarantee that we will agree with everything that everyone says but we will understand everyone's world better for that we have to be curious and pathetic and we have to put judgment to one side we are all complicated perhaps there would be less fighting maybe even fewer walls and bombings in response to a fast changing world we must all adapt fast make sure we listen document our truth and bring up the next generation to know as many words as possible all right thank you so very much Seba should we do some Q&A with you now or we'll wait till the very end of the session all right that is what we will do then so I'm not looming large behind you and listen to you guys all right that sounds great Chris take it away thanks so much for being here thank you so much to John tell it for organizing this panel I thought I want to ask how my understandings of home shift one camps are the dwelling that one must inhabit in yesterday's morning plenary panelists consider this question in relation to the World War two Japanese American internment camps pointing toward the tenuousness of being at home for Asian Americans when the legal and cultural parameters of US citizenship has been consistently defined over and against the Asian other these camps as discussed yesterday indexed displacements from home on multiple levels they were forced to abandon their homes as the government confiscated their property their legal rights and protections as citizens and residents were suspended attorneys were assigned identification numbers and relocated to flimsy barracks in the desert fenced in by barbed wires and under military watch contemplating camps and how they mediate the relationship between Asian Americans and the US I want to explore what Mia observed yesterday as the trickiness of the word camp stratifying between permanence and transient camp stage struggles over the meanings of the very spaces and bodies that they accommodate which cannot be easily settled or contained I suggest that examining and playing with multiple registers of camp can productively illuminate how Asian Americans engage in performances of embodied placemaking as geographers are jitsun and Lisa Silverman articulate embodied placemaking elucidates the ways that space shapes and a shaped by macro political historical and economic social economic forces as cash in the car has argued camp signal a specialization of objection assuming national significance in segregating and containing a racial threat from within the nation space yet embodied placemaking also emphasizes how spaces and bodies are mutually constitutive in creating meaning for one another gesturing toward the capacities of bodies and negotiating reworking and transforming the conditions and spaces that they inhabit and what follows I chart three different multiplication manifestations of camp to consider how Asian Americans engage with practices of embodied placemaking to contest conditions of impossibility for home within the US nation state crucial in these constant stations I suggest our struggles over understandings about the work that Asian American as a category does and the labor that Asian American bodies perform camp one rigid political or intellectual group formations generally characterized by staunch ideological stances intellectual naivete and an unwillingness to compromise following the social movements of 60s and 70s new structures of home seem to emerge through various group new groups formed around the label of Asian American from political organizations to cultural institutions and academic disciplines in universities yet recent decades have shown that these homes remain precarious at best for example despite the work of their company specifically dedicated to a casting Asian American performers actors of color are consistently underrepresented in the actual productions nationwide similarly scholars in Asian American studies have found that interdisciplinary programs like ethnic studies remain ghetto wise while the traditional departments that the movements aim to change insist that they're not responsible for analyzing questions of race within the times of economic recession during which both universities and cultural institutions offer budget cuts Asian Americanists must prove the work of their the worth of their existence as these groups and the value of their work yet and so far as carly and cultural productions around race often explore issues of social and equity and power relations the work that they do that we do often fails to meet the allegedly neutral standards measures of excellence productivity and universality demanded by funding sources unable to achieve status as high work that transcendently speaks of a deracinated human condition our work is dismissed as mere play according to economic measures our work to borrow saline longs terms is considered extravagant rather than necessary and somewhere we see often times that the nations of Asian Americans and different racially specific organizations as camps reflect a general dismissal of work that calls for examinations of race beyond a mere surface level embrace of diversity flattening Asian American into purely demographic and bureaucratic terms institutions deploy the category to add diversity while evacuating it of all historical and political work in other words Asian American is made to work for the interests of the institution while any other labor is devalued given a given this flattening of Asian American I want to think about what forms of work the category can still perform to critique and remake these conditions of racial labor camp to architectures of temporary accommodations typically used by soldiers refugees prisoners and or travelers that's the office Oxford dictionary in addition to Japanese American internment camps a number of camp formations describe the history of Asians in the US even more broadly scholarship establishes the regularity with which modern nation states use a variety of camps for objectives such as detention security labor death evacuation and resettlement and justified on the basis of necessity whether as a consequence of natural disaster profit making or national security. Meanwhile and can people be our varying degrees of criminalization rightlessness and confinement as a consequence of these practices so in my larger project I'm interested in exploring how the management of these different camps come to consolidate a mode of Asian racialization that marginalized multiple different groups of people from Asia in order to buttress they power and national identity against this racialized population and I won't be able to really talk about this at length or all these different types of camps but I'll focus very briefly on thinking about labor camps such as those housing Chinese migrant laborers working on the transcontinental railroad which only serve as one particular manifestation of the very complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between US state power and Asian racialization. During the gold rush in the 1850s the Chinese immigrated to California and mass along with many other groups propelled in part by famine the lack of economic opportunities and political turmoil in China. When the construction for a transcontinental railroad was authorized in the 1860s the Chinese served as the perfect labor source for a back breaking work that white workers were reluctant to take on. By 1867 the company employed and this is the central Pacific railroad company approximately 12,000 Chinese migrants who made up 90 percent of the labor force. Given the relative absence of Chinese migrant laborers from official records fiction and drama has been central to recovering their history and for the remainder of my talk I want to consider very briefly a few scenes from David Henry Wong's play The Dance and the Railroad which was initially commissioned by the New York City Department of Education 1981 and was recently restaged at the Signature Theatre in New York in 2012. Revisiting this historical moment Wong's play situates us in resistance. During an eight day strike in 1867 when Chinese laborers refused to work and demanded equal pay to their white counterparts removed from the camps the play takes place on a nearby mountain top where Wong, a 20 year old Chinese migrant laborer who has been working on the railroad for two years practices his picking opera. Ma, a naive 18 year old who arrived to the camps just two months ago spies on and interrupts Wong's practice. He begs Wong to teach him the moves of the opera and in the mentorship that ensues, Ma conveys his idealistic dreams of getting rich from the camps in Gold Mountain and Wong exposes the realities and its exploitative labor conditions. Through these two characters the play contemplates the ways in which their labors and bodily performances are separated out into work and play. The form are seemingly represented by the railroad and the ladder by the dance. Indeed Wong practices his art and solitude detaching himself from the rest of the workers. An idealistic Ma however seems to see a linkage between Wong's practices of dance and the strike that's occurring in the background observing quote that stuff you're doing it's beautiful why don't you do it for the guys at camp help us celebrate. Wong dismisses the strike questioning its very effectiveness in changing conditions of work at the camps. Reluctant efforts Wong agrees to teach Ma on the condition that Ma acknowledges that the Chinese labors are all quote unquote dead men projecting camp as the spaces that index their social death as racial labor long points to the deadness of their body since they are being purely animated by racial capital quote it's ugly to practice when the mountain has turned muscles to ice when my body hurts too much to come here I look at the other China men and think they are dead they their muscles work only because the white man forces them. The attempts to maximize their labor productivity comes at the expense of the deterioration of their bodies and here racial difference medates the material contradiction and the fantasy for a peer free abstract labor for long the dance represents a reprieve from this deadening. He says I live because I because I can still force force my muscles to work for me. However if Ma's insistence that he just wants to perform a signal or work of play long uses opera as not disconnected from the laboring conditions to which his body is subjected in camp instead he stresses that it is also a form of work that requires discipline of the body long shows that performances of dance are part of the labor of enacting survival strategy strategy strategies for managing the deadening labor of the camp system. And so far as camp seems to illustrate spaces of confinement as presenting totalizing conditions of oppressive violence I argue that the play gestures toward another mode of camp to underscore the possibility for otherwise as long and ma's debates around the possibility of allowing the body to perform otherwise manifest through competing notions of masculinity their simultaneous desire for and failure to approximate masculine ideals I argue register as campiness camp three known as a subcultural style and strategy of incongruity parody playfulness and theatricality camp aesthetics is most often associated with practices developed by queers in the US and Europe to manage practicing in the closet discussing campiness in relation to Asian American raises some concerns as David Ng has argued masculinity is a crucial site of contestation for managing the relationship between Asian American men and the US national body politic the Chinese railroad laborers have been interpreted as exemplifying both the emasculation of Asian American men through restrictive immigration laws that produce bachelor societies and as a masculine ideal that privileges hard physical labor hostility toward Chinese migrants based on anxieties of economic competition manifested in a wide circulation of visual imagery that depicted these men as a feminine and asexual which as we all know has had a long enduring legacy in response a number of literary texts and performances have aimed to challenge the stereotypes by reaffirming masculinity and alongside and in slight contrast to these dominant practices Hwang's play I suggest points us toward the possibility that campiness has been an important strategy of critical mimesis as Karen Shmikawa discussed yesterday for Asian American cultural producers campiness can possibly open up an alternative archive of the practices by which Asian Americans aim to challenge rewrite and transform the logics of gender and sexuality that facilitate their objection from US citizenship and his foundational work on queer of color critique Jose S. Bon Munoz called attention to camp as a practice by racial subjects who identify with oppressive logics of gender and sexuality that comes to be reproduced in dominant cultural norms and kept aesthetic signal practices of resistance and acted by minority groups by inhabiting inhabiting the stifling spaces and norms in order to challenge them from within from within these spaces performances of campiness I assert has the potential of mapping what Munoz calls a queer utopianism which imagines an ideal for charity that simultaneously demands a relentless critique of the present conditions that foreclose its realization and and the dance in the railroad that plays the patient of campiness gesture toward queer utopianism through the opera as loan and my contemplate the possibility for the body to perform otherwise under the system of racial labor so other than Chinese fully for my he sees the picking opera as a site to enact his idealistic dreams of returning to China which rather than symbolizing any authentic homeland of return comes to represent this imagined elsewhere of utopia which is coded in highly masculinized terms Ma states by the time I go back to China I'll ride in gold sedan chairs with 20 wise fanning me all around but the 20 wise proving the worth of his labor he also hopes to appropriate the tradition of picking opera to cast their labor on Golden Mountain on gold now excuse me and heroic terms quote I'll play Guangdong and tell stories of what life was like on the gold mountain we lay track like soldiers by insisting upon playing the role of Guangdong Ma approximates this elsewhere through the masculine heroism of Chinese traditions and in doing so he simultaneously reveals his distance from this ideal given his current position in the camps I'm I'm wearing a little low on time so I'm going to condense some of the reading I'm happy to answer any questions so in the closing scene campiness manifests in a utopian practice as Lone and Ma and acts out an actual opera and hearing about the victory of the strike in obtaining demands for a pay increase and decrease working hours Lone changes his previous skepticism about the effectiveness of strikes contextualized within his thoughts about the deadness of the laboring body the success of the strike causes Lone to see the possibility for agents through agency through the dance within the labor conditions of the railroad subsequently the victory inspires a blending of the railroad into the dance and rather than assume the role of Guangdong which Ma long desired he instead demands that they perform an opera that specifically written about their experience as a migrant labor in the US quote so let's do an opera about me traditional loan you got a figure anyway I do Guangdong wasn't going to be traditional anyway in the staging of a mock heroic drama Lone and Ma perform it perform an ironic juxtaposition between the supposedly heroic form of the opera and the quotidian story of their travels and travails as migrant workers so very quickly they use all these different objects from a tin bowl and wooden stick to become their gong they very nearly switched different roles sometimes playing the different types of races on labor is that they encountered and it's the first time that they really on parody and assume a broken English the whole time they're speaking without any Chinese or Oriental accent and towards the end there's this very interesting weird scene where they're performing at the labor of like hitting the rocks and then they're doing all these things with each other's bodies and they're like moaning and really suggestive ways suggestive in a sense that it's like the act of hitting this mountain is sexualized in some way and yet it's the fact that there's no woman like it's a very interesting play on thinking about the erotics and what's happening with the body at that moment and so in addition to resonating with can't be practices of appropriating genres and convention the sequence is imbued with both humor and sorrow a sense of helplessness and a fire of resistance and can't be in this comes to not only parody their failure to perform by the necessitated demands of masculinity but also to critique the ways in which the camp system comes to intimately regulate bodies in terms of its movements contacts intimacies and desires. So skipping ahead I'll just say that these performances illustrate I think give us a way to think about how Asian-Americans veringly assert bodily agency through everyday performances of embodied placemaking that actively negotiate and remake the various spaces that we inhabit and as such we may see Asian-American performance as a capacious site for mapping queer utopianism as home because of imperative for persistent critique of the present in order to imagine and materialize a more just future. Thank you. Thank you so much Chris. That was terrific. A few years ago I was in the green room which is what we cleverly call our communal space in the theater department of the Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and I was discussing with a friend the Chinese characters and the yellow face that happens in the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes. Another colleague overheard us and interrupted us. Oh are you Asian? She asked me implying that my research interest in Asian slash American studies was principally if not solely because of my Asian slash American identity. And as a mixed race person I became legible only when I publicly talked about Asian-ness. Instead of broaching my colleagues presumptions and racial logic in that moment I decided to explain my heritage a demand often made of me in order to make my passage through this situation easier. I open with this anecdote to foreground how allegedly safe spaces or homes like the green room are sites of contestation and that I am complicit in their construction and maintenance. In this talk I will discuss not feeling at home as a theater scholar and spectator through the case study of Anything Goes. I draw from women of color scholarship on the affective dimensions of performance and politics. And as for the musical I am interested in my own discomfort which Karen Shimakawa has brought up and alienation with the marginalizing of Chinese characters and centering of Yellow Face performances in contrast with most audiences and musical scholars who feel at ease. Finally I would like to gesture toward how we can create critical homes of inquiry in the theater and in the academy. The scholarly work of Doreen Kondo and Sarah Ahmed inspire my approach to pleasure, displeasure and home. In About Face Performing Race in Fashion and Theater Doreen Kondo writes quote I seek to reclaim pleasure as a site of potential contestation that might engage and at times be co-extensive with the critical impulse. How we dress, how we move, the music that accompanies our daily activities and that we create and refashion our engagement with and not simply the passive consumption of media or commodities do matter and can be included in a repertoire of oppositional strategies. Putting these words into action Kondo then describes feeling joyful when recognizing herself in a production of Perri Miyake's Doe Ball as well as feeling indignant when remembering the lukewarm critical reception and contingency of homes for Asian Americans. She is acknowledging that homes emerge from and are built upon a field of power and she writes the realism of Doe Ball heightened the felt necessity to create homes for ourselves however problematic and provisional figuring home not as an essentialized space of identity but as an historically culturally specific construct inseparable from power relations. So she has these mixed feelings and a call for critical spaces and that brings me to Sarah Ahmed's book the promise of happiness in which she addresses the politics of the imperative to happiness. In the book she points out how happiness can actually obscure power inequalities and that when you point out such inequalities you then cause people to be unhappy and then when you do that you become the problem and unhappiness becomes attributed to you so power is not the problem the structure is not the problem. So to give you a more concrete example consider when a woman walks down the street and a man demands that she smile. This demand emerges from patriarchy and to highlight that structure and refuse to smile often causes the man to become unhappy and then to locate that unhappiness in the woman who is a troublemaker a feminist killjoy rather than in systemic oppression. And so unhappiness feeling like you have the wrong response to something can be very alienating. The sense of feeling out of place and the demand for pleasure or happiness are particularly acute when it comes to musicals especially revivals because they are supposed to make you happy. They can conjure up feelings of familiarity and comfort and nostalgia along for a past that never truly existed. In a chapter called after the Golden Age musicologist Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth Wallman urges to challenge how nostalgia and revisionism in revivals maintain hegemonic conceptions of Americans and US identity. Revivals and their marketing materials often imagine the past as a better simpler time. This simplification is particularly troubling when conceived as white, heteronormative, and bourgeois homogeneity that totally obscures historical and continuing material inequalities. By revising structural oppression or relegating it to the past, revivals can allay contemporary anxieties of privileged audience members. Theorist David Savrin argues that musicals merit study in part because of, quote, the politics of pleasure. No theater form is as single-mindedly devoted to producing pleasure, inspiring spectators to tap their feet, sing along, or otherwise be carried away. This utopian and mimetic dimension of the musical linked to its relentless reflexivity makes it into a kind of hot house for the manufacture of theatrical seduction and the ideological positions to which mass audiences can be seduced. So what he's saying is that pleasure is intersected with popularity and that often makes elites look down upon musicals. But I would argue that that's precisely why musicals are a productive site of struggle that articulates power structures and why they should be studied. And musical theater scholar Stacy Wolf adds in a manifesto called In Defense of Pleasure. She says, use pleasure as a way in to teach and study musicals and pleasure motivates. So for me, I subversively question pleasure in other people as a way in and my displeasure motivates me and my engagement with anything goes. So we've already brought up this musical this morning actually and I'm sure you know it's by Cole Porter largely. It features two China men who were originally named Qing and Ling in the 1934 Broadway production. Contemporary reviews rarely even mention the existence of these characters and the yellow face that concludes the musical. And I would argue this silencing reproduces a very specific kind of symbolic violence to Asian Americans that obscure structural anti Asian racism. When scholars do discuss anything goes and its politics, they often downplay or again ignore the Asian characters and yellow face. For example, there's a book called Enchanted Evenings, the Broadway musical from Shobo to Sondheim and Jeffrey Block traces changes to the musicals because it's been revised and revived many times. And he argues that all traces of racism are removed. In another article recently drawn from Mikhail Bakhtin and Michelle Foucault, George Burroughs asserts that the ship it takes place on this cruise ship of anything goes is a carnivalistic heterotopia that offers fertile ground for exploring social differences through a special mode of self performance that is staged outside of restrictive conventions that operate at home. So such self performance, however, is the privilege of white protagonists and they get to sing their own songs and adopt myriad personas on this ship, which is called the SS American while the Chinese characters barely speak. And in 1934, the Chinese Exclusion Act is still in place and they also don't get any songs to sing. So where is a home for these characters? When I search for production stills for the roundabout theater companies Revival in 2011, I found only one image of the Chinese characters played by Andrew Quo and Raymond J. Lee and they are way upstage and totally blocked by the ensemble, which is almost all white people and they don't get to dance. They're standing there while everyone else is tap dancing to anything goes. And they actually do get to enter the tap dance after several minutes of that Act I closing number. And it's when the protagonist, Reno, welcomes the characters into the ensemble and she presses her hands together and bows to them. And then the melody in the orchestration turns to wood blocks in this Orientalist fashion. So the Chinese men dance at the end of the number, but they are permitted to participate only minimally and conditionally. And here I want to be clear that I'm not critiquing the actors for taking on these roles. I'm just questioning the extent to which the SS American and what it represents constitutes a home for Asian-Americans. Instead of further unpacking Qing and Ling here, I would like to focus on the yellow face that concludes the musical. I could not find any images of the yellow face performance from the roundabout production, probably because roundabout doesn't want to make those images public. Again, that reproduces this obscuring and silencing that I'm talking about. One of the few scholars who did address the yellow face on the musicals, if only very briefly in a couple sentences, is Raymond Knapp. And he wrote, particularly troubling are the scenes in which Billy, Reno, and Moonface disguise themselves as Chinese, quite as if this did not count as racist in the same way as blackface. And as a side note, as we know, social justice activists often compare yellow face to blackface, I think really in order to be taken seriously and to expose the limited black-white binary of US relations and the relative invisibilizing of anti-Asian oppression. So in anything goes toward the end, the Chinese converts lose their chengsam by gambling and then being physically assaulted. Like, they're literally one is hit on the head with a glass bottle and these, by these central implicitly white characters played by white actors. And in the roundabout production, Reno, Billy, and Moonface take their clothes and put them on, which are now haunted by Asian bodies and they wear dark glasses and they take on these mincing gates and allegedly Chinese accents amidst Orientalist orchestrations. They enact the white privilege of putting on and taking off racial markers, but without the attendant yellow makeup and taped eyes common in earlier cultural productions. And finally, they're convincing yellow face performances is what helps to solve the comic plot and put the correct couples together. When I attended the revival, I found that the audience there roared at the broken English and the exchanges such as, rich man cannot buy Chinese honor. I'll make it 5,000. Chinese honor sold. And the comedy of that relies upon a performance of yellow face as distinct from a normative white American. And it is in part because of the genre of comedy that allows some to dismiss charges of structural racism in this musical. In so doing, those who take pleasure in the comedy are really placing their feelings over the feelings of other folks, those who feel displeasure. And what that act does is it socially reproduces white supremacy and the silencing of Asian slash American deviance. I'm personally struck by how yellow face remains in the roundabout production in 2011, despite the many revisions that the libretto has undergone. As scholar Bruce Currow reminds us, musicals are open texts. And each revision suggests changing US racial formations and discourses. So for example, Qing and Ling have been renamed John and Luke as if this is necessarily less troubling because the characters now have assimilated names from the Gospels. Moreover, the yellow face of this text is barely acknowledged in popular discussion from Broadway to summer camps. And in the moment of performance, many spectators actually find yellow face extremely pleasurable. And it leaves me alienated and I think many of us here and we've been talking about this again this morning. So again, I just want to draw our attention to actually most people really like it. And I think that's important to remember. And now I'm going to quote Sharon Karin Shimakawa. And in National Objection, the Asian-American body on stage, she provocatively and convincingly argues about Jonathan Price in Miss Saigon that quote, for a large segment of mainstream Broadway theater audiences, watching a white man in yellow face with taped eyes, blackened teeth, greased hair and bronze skin is more pleasurable, more comprehensible, and for producers, more profitable than watching an Asian or Asian-American male body on stage. So it's utterly important to remember that cultural productions can be problematic and pleasurable at the same time because they emerge from a field of power. And the academy is not immune, but indeed an institution that participates in, replicates, and sometimes challenges systemic oppression. As I suggested at the start of this talk, I've been thinking critically about anything goes for a couple years now, but I was able to present papers on the topic only recently when I organized my own panels. At the Association for Theater and Higher Education Conference this past summer, my paper on yellow face and revivals was surprisingly well received. And I say surprisingly because typically when I present this kind of work, critiquing institutional racism and our implications therein, I receive responses that I'm exaggerating material racial inequality, that I have not proven the conservative aspects of racial projects, that I'm being too sensitive or too harsh or too pessimistic. So I will never know if my abstracts for those other conferences that like, were they rejected because they were not good enough, they were not interesting enough or just didn't fit with other panelists and how each of those assessments about goodness, interestingness, fit is shaped by power structures. I would like to end by meditating on feeling pleasure and displeasure to construct homes. Again, Doreen Kondo, she concludes her book about face by calling upon Asian-American artists and scholars to use the tools of their trade to authorize their own stories. Quote, theater performance and design have created spaces where Asians and Asian-Americans can write our faces, mount institutional interventions, enact emergent identities, re-figure utopian possibilities, and construct political subjectivities that might enable us to affect political change. We have many institutional homes from Asian-American specific theater companies to Ralph Pena's Facebook Wall, where artists have critiqued the recent production The Mikado in Seattle to this very conference where we are doing the labor of representation and redress and often having a lot of fun doing so. At the same time, I think that we need to be mindful of Sarah Ahmed's critique that happiness can obscure material inequality and that actually unhappiness can also bring us together. Quote, there is solidarity in recognizing our alienation from happiness. Even if we do not inhabit the same place as we do not, there can be joy in killing joy and kill joy we must and we do. In the green room, I navigate microaggressions and feelings of despondency and alienation when my attempts at consciousness raising and diversity in faculty and staff and students appear to fail. I leave the green room for the continued space that is the mentoring future faculty of color project and initiative that my friends, including Chris and colleagues, mostly from the English department, co-founded two years ago. I ask, how do we continue to use pleasure and displeasure to motivate us in the deconstruction and construction of homes? How do we make yellow green rooms? Thank you. All right, let's see if we can get Seba back and start this discussion going. Are there any questions or comments from the audience? We would love to hear your feedback. And I feel like we've had a lot of panels in the past couple of days and less discussion time. So I'd love to take advantage of that and hear about what do you think of home and its contingency and our implications therein and the problematic aspects but also the possibilities. Yes. My fiance's parents are in Miami and her grandmother's in Florence, Italy. I live in Philadelphia and I have made this as much of a home as I think I ever will have. But that being said, I will never truly be home. There is no such thing as a physical place marker that I could ever consider to be home simply because the people, the places, the experiences and the things that mean so much to me in my life are split between so many nations and cultures. So that being said, you know, the work that I do as the director for the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival has really allowed me to build upon these kinds of ideas and these connections within the Asian Pacific American community because I think that more so than any other community of color in the United States, we have this tremendous diversity of experience amongst what is amazingly called one community, right? The experience of a first-generation South Asian immigrant or a first-generation Cambodian refugee is going to be entirely different than a fourth-generation Japanese or Chinese Americans experience. And yet we're still lumped together as Asian-Americans. And that's one thing I think we have to look at from a state perspective and a power structure perspective, but at the same time, I feel more comfortable in Asian-American spaces. And I think most other people here would say, regardless of the ethnicity that they come from within that spectrum of Asian Pacific American, that in a room full of Asian-Americans, there is this commonality. And maybe that's just simply because of the fact that we all do have such diverse experiences at the margins of society in the United States. So I don't know where to take that. I'll leave that and give the mic back to the panelists. But that's my experience on this idea of home. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. Being academics in the room, I'm interested in it. This is also a continuation of the earlier conversation of a redefinition of what classic is and means because we often, what I find is classic can be a cover for allowing, you know, this is a classic. It can't be changed. That's what it is. And realizing, A, that who determines what a classic is and what that means is one is set up in a structure that is one that excludes us naturally and our artists and our forms and our stories. And that also fixes our portrayals in a certain place and time and moving beyond that. And so I think that's the question a lot of times with the micado, it's like, well, this is what this piece is and we can't change it. And what it needs to be is, well, maybe we need to either not do these pieces anymore or move the conversation forward in a different way. So I'm curious about your thoughts about that because I think that's what, by a lot of these things being called classics and being known quantities, it allows the kind of the institutional racism to continue and perpetuate. I totally agree with your comment and sentiment about classics and what constitutes the canon who decides and then how that is reproduced by who has funding, who has power, who can buy theater tickets and who runs theater institutions. And I would also add, I was intrigued by your comment about a fixing portrayals in time and in the past and how that resonates with ideas of Orientalism, which so often imagines Asia as this mythical place stuck in the past that is unchanging, that's static. And therefore how, again, reproducing the micado, a operetta that's more than 100 years old as well as anything goes and we talked about the king and I, how that again, that reproduces a fixing in the past without change. And yeah, and so we need to change, obviously what those culture productions are that get on stage, but also I think because we're bringing the Academy in here about what shows are taught in class and how, and even if you do teach canonical texts to teach them with a critical lens as opposed to one simply reifying and celebrating it as mere representation, as mere visibility politics. Yeah, do you have anything to add Sabah or Chris? There's a thunderstorm happening here so I have to keep killing my mic. I think one has to work. I really appreciated what you said, Danjala, about the working past, the pleasure and the experience that one has, the questions and the challenges that come up. So my process has really been to redefine for myself those what is literature, what is art and celebrate for myself as opposed. And that is why in many ways I've resisted the canon because every time I enter the academic sphere unless it's defined by myself, like right now I'm teaching a class called Art as Activism. So my co-professor and myself are choosing all the texts and all the art that we're presenting to the students and that makes it, okay, that is tolerable but if we look at existing structures, we won't find it unless we find others, like-minded colleagues across the world, really. I'm interested actually in, this is actually for Danjala as well. Can you use the mic? I cannot hear you. Oh, sorry. Anything goes in this revision as far as, I also saw the 2011 revival which was using the script that they had used for the previous Broadway revival but as I was mentioning to you last night in the cab, I was, my first role in high school was as Ling in Anything Goes. And where I wore a little field workers hat and moved it with a little mincing gate and whatnot. And so what I was interested in when I went to see the production was because I knew that they had supposedly fixed it racially and then how much was really not. And the idea that they were obviously doing it to address the concerns but doing as little as possible to actually do so. And I was wondering if you can talk just maybe a little more specifically about exactly what changed and what stayed the same between the original script of Anything Goes and the revival and like who they actually talked to in order to, if you know, to make this okay. As far as like how did they actually decide how they were going to make this less offensive? That's an excellent question and another paper but I will give you the highlights. So you're right, they used the libretto that was revised principally by John Whiteman for the 1980s production at Lincoln Center and then they made a couple more changes. The major ones from the 1934 libretto and by the way, that doesn't exist, we have to use the 35 one from the London production and mostly they, first of all, the original actors were Asian actors in the original Broadway production, which is interesting and the text has them speaking in a particular kind of pigeon and that is more Americanized in the newer versions of the play and largely they were put there because the actor, the leading actor, Gakston was known for his yellow face performances so I'm convinced that those characters were there so that then in the end he could take their clothes and don yellow face, which was supposedly hilarious and they are not even really crucial to the script and the ending and the resolution of the marriages. That's something that John Whiteman added actually and the plot just so you know of Anything Goes is that the effeminized British Sir Evelyn is paired with Hope, the white ingenue and they're clearly not supposed to be together and part of that is because Sir Evelyn has slept with a Chinese woman so that has made him impure and in the revival he sings the Gypsy in Me which, you know, essentializes the Roma and originally that song was not his so again there's this other ring of Sir Evelyn and the idea of the yellow face is that they dress up also as the woman he slept with and claim that they had a baby together so that's what breaks up that marriage in order to restore the correct marriages at the end. So that switch, like making the yellow face necessary for the plot resolution is actually a new addition so that's interesting to me that that is so necessary as opposed to they could have done something else in the 1980s revision and then secondly I would say to make it less offensive in the newer production I think they tried to humanize John and Luke slash Ching and Ling a little bit more and they made it clear that one character was much more straight edge than the other one and it's suggested that they're addicted to gambling and to alcohol but not as much this time they have some better punch lines which is great and at the very end of the show which I think is absolutely key is so they've had their clothes taken from them they get to put on the tuxedos of the white male characters and we see them in the very last stage image they don't talk they're so far upstage and literally on top of the structure but we do get to see them one last time in full tuxedos and they look so happy and it actually reminds me in some ways of the ending of like Thoroughly Modern Millie too like that last like American assimilationist move and this is supposed to be a happy ending. Hi, I have a few questions. A small point on the Yellow Face thing I noticed that for you, is the act of a white character disguising themself? Is that actually the same thing to you as a white actor playing a distinctly Asian character on stage? To me they may not be the same thing but I noticed you're using Yellow Face for both. We could get into a discussion of comedy tropes and why from Wybman's point of view making it necessary is better writing rather than inferior writing in terms of talent. I also wanted to react to what Rob was saying. I'm not mixed race but I'm from Southern Illinois, went to British school in Hong Kong, went to Berkeley and then in LA. My brother lives in New Zealand and he's raising a Kiwi daughter and my parents are in Taipei which means between the four of us we triangulate the whole Pacific Ocean. My brother calls me Asian American because of the sort of more political kinds of ways that I talk. He calls himself a global citizen and I realize you know what, that's something most of us, any of us could embrace whatever background and that is a home. Not only is it home, it's a very clear wave of the future. Building off of that, I wanna talk a little bit about global consciousness which gets used a lot these days but most people use it as marketing which is BS. To me what global consciousness and how much of it is in different stories or narratives or narratives to come is a really really vital and interesting thing about the future because traditional dramaturgy, you know it's often, okay one family has to stand in for the whole human race and that's an easier way to write because of the way drama works but more and more I think those stories are inadequate to our narrative needs dealing with the way the world is going. So that means we're gonna have writers and in fact we should encourage writers to figure out okay if politically we believe in the sort of global consciousness and by that means that there are certain humanist principles that have to underlie all our work, right? On some level and we're responsible for it so therefore the comfort and discomfort we cause as artists whether we intended it or not we're still responsible and then how is that reflected in our work. So then how writers are going to capture that in the future is very interesting to me and I think that's a discussion I would love to have with more people. Since we have academics in the room I'm also curious whether you feel there are already texts that I may or may not know about that already approach that or succeed in doing that. So I throw that question out there or we have to call it into being. Dear him saying it's a slightly different kind of dramaturgy even than the traditional perhaps. There are filmmakers who try to do this as well to bring degrees of success that I think are also worth talking about but going back to that point global citizen is a great identity, do you know what I mean? Cause I hear folks talk about oh I'm caught in between and all of that is true but you're also privileged or I don't mean you we are also privileged in that way is that in that one action my brother it's like he has a super glamorous life he's an academic he's in Europe he's there his daughter's gonna speak three languages you know cause she's also half the Filipino. It's a very viable I think and powerful identity for what's to come. I agree with you and I think that the one of the very difficult things for us as like academics or like cultural producers to navigate the divide is like how our work is valued in a way right and what brings people into the venue the room to hear what we say and I'm very much a proponent of like using all of these different types of language of global consciousness et cetera which can be really used towards very fucked up ways and then getting them into a room and then messing with it right so like okay so global you might think that global citizenship or like consciousness as an audience member is to come in and to think about like how we look at like a very wealthy like metropolitan Singapore and like transnational is going around buying everything right the crazy rich Asians from Kevin Kwong and then coming in and saying like well let's actually look at the very very real different types of fractures and divide right and also thinking about how race and Asian American means something very particular where it is both simultaneously global but has very manifest in very local ways and has a lot of fraught histories and I think that we could also this was had another point yeah sure yeah I'm with you Chris and I think part of what we're getting at here actually really resonates with what Saba was saying in her talk again about border lines and various global issues and I loved how she intertwined seemingly disparate issues like nationalism with drones and which with critiques of patriarchy as well which are demands that we need to criticize if we're gonna claim titles of global citizen and not just be cosmopolitan so I think that distinction is important and then to address your point about comedy tropes and the necessity of the yellow face I see what you're saying about the differences and I use the umbrella of yellow face which I think we should actually employ as a much larger category beyond like putting yellow on your face for instance but I see that I think what you're insinuating is when there are productions in which there's a conscious putting on of the yellow face like we get to see it and it's part of the narrative that's very different from a not reflected upon production in which it just happens from the start and so I do think there is a distinction there and there is always the possibility of when it is a meta theatrical production that it draws attention to the very performativity of race that it shows us that it's social construction and therefore it can be changed and I think that's very productive but on the other hand I don't wanna see any yellow face especially when people are so happy around me seeing it and I just feel horrible and then when also nobody talks about it except for us here and we meet only every couple of years or on Facebook or whatever so that's but I agree that there is a distinction there. Are there any other questions? I have one for Chris if you're... I was just gonna comment that one of the comforts that I find is in the term transnational so then I don't have to claim one place or the other and I can not, it's comforting if you're gonna take a label that's one that fits a little bit better because when I at least move between spaces and I don't have the nationalism to either space I don't, and I think that but invariably no matter where I go in this country at least people say where are you from? And I think that one of you talked about the issue of clothing, the choice of clothing and how, what that ends up meaning and somebody asked me why did I choose to wear a sari for that TEDx and for me that is reclaiming my history actually but I also understand that it can be viewed as it can be orientalized, exoticized and it's a very complicated issue of what identity is. The most important thing I think is to talk about it and not be afraid of those really difficult subjects. So I just wanted to throw that out. I think it's also really important to recognize what was talked about earlier about films where white characters are playing non-white characters like Ben Kingsley and Gandhi and then to watch movies like Not Without My Daughter and see how in general that kind of mentality is presented to the wider audience and there's very little consciousness of what that actually means to have those kinds of conflicts presented to audience members and there's no analysis. I had actually one question for Ceva which was about the group that you were addressing in there like what was the context for that talk and I'm trying to read these things all together actually in response to your comment about global citizenship actually maybe you brought it, I'm sorry it's in the bathroom but the idea of global citizenship I think and transnationalism I think are really interesting and productive but I guess part of my attraction to those terms is more because they open up the possibility of not knowing, right? I'm not a global citizen because we're all the same. I'm a global citizen in the sense that there is a whole world and I guess part of my question is for Ceva, like your concept of global citizenship or the kind of dispersed home that you were talking about seemed more, well I mean I'm not trying to oppose them but part of what seemed interesting to me about it is there are whole worlds that I don't know and that's okay, right? There is a way of being in the world that is on the other side of the globe that I'm connected to but that I can't claim that we're all the same and that's okay. It's more about making it okay to not be accountable for and owning everything and homogenizing everything but actually having that kind of sense of the unknowable and the radically different and yet connected membership and some sort of, I don't know, community that is really dispersed in that way. I don't know if I'm making sense, I'm sorry but I guess I just wanna put a little pressure on the term global or transnational because there are different ways to understand it. There's one in which it's like yes we're all the same and there's another which is yes we are impossibly different and that's okay, right? And so I'd be sort of curious to know like how you experience that and how you have a certain experience of it that's personal so that's one thing. I'm sorry that was a really bad question but I'm, anyway but the second one is about pleasure and displeasure and I just to go back to Sal Ling's thing about necessity and extravagance and I guess I wanna say this on a group of people who are practicing artists I wanna make a pitch for extravagance, right? For extravagance's sake because I feel like at least in my kind of academic position in the arts I find that we are often having to justify the kind of art that you guys do in this sort of political functionalist way. This is necessary, right? This is, here's the kind of the political project, the agenda that this is why we must do this and this is why you must listen to us and I find myself in my own job trying to turn that on its head to say isn't there something about just purely gratuitous weird pleasurable art that makes us human that is worth doing not because we can justify it for a particular political project but because that I mean I just I'm worried that especially kind of race specific art or community specific art always has to justify itself in terms of some kind of anthropological explanation which I find that other artists don't have to do, right? They can just be beautiful or it can just be weird and so I guess I'm trying to, I realize it's a very naive thing and I'm speaking as a tenured professor so I don't have to make a living doing that but I guess this is my little one woman project to like make people just do weird art and not have to justify it, right? So anyway, so but I did have a real question first of all about the context of the talk that you were giving and how it was received. Yes, so for me I don't claim to be a global citizen it's really more about transnationalism knowing one country, one city really really knowing two cities on opposite sides of the world really well and that helps me recognize issues in other places but by no means can I say that I know what it means to be on the Dada Strip right now or to be on the Bangladesh border trying to cross over into India and have guns aimed at you so I just think and it can get very specific and that is why my work has always been very localized then you have to take it to the very, very local issues. So that's really what that term means for me more it's not about claiming one place it's just saying there's more than one place that may be honest about that because Asian-American does not fit me so if you're going to put a label and Pakistani does not fit me so what am I then? Where does that go? People invariably there's a label and I would love to shed it all together and just be as you said with that notion of pleasure or expression and not have a message so that's a very, very valid point too about art just for maybe are you saying art just for art's sake or which is I think it's fine I don't think that there's an issue I don't think that one should have message in one's work I think what comes out from the work that I do is just what is on my mind at a particular moment and it could be the orchids that are blooming and are about to die I don't know how to take care of them because I don't have time. I think it's very but invariably whatever I produce will be interpreted through that lens of well you are this and therefore your work, what does it represent? Right? So I was just talking to a friend of mine who is Palestinian who's a Palestinian poet and he was talking about how he is also trying to just shed it and just be a poet like what does it mean to just say I'm an artist and not have a label attached? Did I get to your question? Donatello? Yeah, that was great, thank you. One thing that I didn't mention when I was making my comment before is that having had this kind of experience between countries and cultures I simultaneously feel at home and I do feel like I can exist, like I can manage. I have agency between borders just because of the variety of experiences that I've had to live through and because of the cultures and languages that I've had to adapt to. So in that sense, I like this idea of transnational, global citizen I do ascribe to slightly but I think that more appropriately would be third culture because for me especially with strong roots in my Japanese side and certainly in my American side, I'm torn between those two cultures and I guess throwing in other nations in between that you get pulled in different directions so maybe it's fourth or fifth culture after a while but the point is you are simultaneously belonging to them and something other than that so kind of bringing it back to the art side how do we as artists convey that to people who have not had those experiences and I think that that's the most challenging thing because when we're in a room full of Asian Americans or when we're in a room of people of color we can identify certainly amongst Asian Americans but on a broader scale people of color have all been marginalized in our society so there are commonalities that people can relate to however when you start to look at that kind of mainstream theater audience predominantly we still do have the patronage and we still do have this kind of funding system that is deeply rooted in this kind of mainstream white American culture and this is a culture that from my experience growing up in suburban Connecticut is no where near acculturated to this idea of sharing culture, of being a third culture so how do we integrate that into our work in a way that is manageable and navigable by these people who are not familiar with these concepts? I think specificity and speaking from just I guess in response to that specificity and speaking from your own experience just totally authentically and honestly is what's really powerful in drawing people into how you would work that into your art you know like I would be so interested to hear your story in your journey in terms of how you came to identifying how you do I think that and then there's also assumption I think that we all look at each other and then we're gonna assume certain things I think I probably look very Japanese American you know but just because I'm so called 100% Japanese by blood doesn't mean that I'm not full of diversity and like belong to so many different communities and identities but there's a process in getting there right and I don't know I'm a big fan of difference and we're totally different we're so not the same we're just not and so I think that you know being specific is that thus where then we find connection if not same you know what's the same the look what the same oneness not sameness you know so and just to echo on that I mean I don't have the answer for that but I think that is the artistic challenge you know what I mean and I don't know it's a rich opportunity and we just have to create and keep trying to find ways of doing that and I think what you were saying about extravagance I do think the challenge for Asian American artists it's funny because I read scripts at a regional theater and they were both like we're totally open and then when an Asian American play would come in well it's probably gonna be about an Asian family where someone dies and there's a ghost and I was like nine times out of 10 it was that you know what I mean which is you know but it's like so then they kind of were like we're both open and then we're not against the stereotype and it was also that I was encouraging Asian American artists to just write your stories and think on a broader canvas and it's okay if you wanna write just a comedy or just a farce or you wanna write something you know what I mean that don't feel compelled to sometimes the social action is just telling your story you know what I mean and it doesn't have to feel like it has to have that weight and I think the trend is that in this day and age everyone wears multiple hats no matter who you are so just saying a white person doesn't mean because there is sexuality there's class there's so many different things so everyone is experiencing that and going to experience that and there's community and our isolation in that way of not feeling like you belong anywhere and everywhere and so I think those are the kind of the next generation of artistic questions that we have to fight and maybe it's also the ways that we are telling those stories and the structures that allow those you know what I mean so maybe it's a different type of experience of storytelling you know versus something on a proscenium stage that's naturalistic that we have to figure out. Thanks so much for that beautiful comment and it strikes the chord with something I've been thinking lately and that came up quite often there are conversations these few things it's like thinking about what Asian American means but also thinking about what race means when it enters conversations about cultural productions and arts because oftentimes sometimes I would hear from performers or artists is like oh I am very intent on not performing as an Asian American artist or like oh I want this to be something else besides identity or whatever and I think that oftentimes race or Asian American is perceived as to be like the closing door for creativity right it's like oh there's just about race there's just about Asian American but I would encourage us to along with what Karen is suggesting what you're suggesting is actually to take it up and say like no this thing that seems like it has nothing whatsoever to do with Asian American is Asian American and Asian American and race are actually opening doors for their invitations for something much more imaginative and creative right I think one of the major themes today has been about multiplicity of homes but also not having a home and that productive tension between both of those and getting back to an earlier question about various cultural productions and homes I've been thinking of a couple of folks like Young Jean Lee who just writes all sorts of different plays and is not like necessarily in an Asian American box and her next play is called Straight White Men right I wanted to mention Allegiance the Musical and that I think productively will deal with home but then the question is will it come to Broadway and now it's marketing is like a family you'll come to love a story you've never heard and the you implies that you don't know about Japanese American internment so I think that's interesting and then briefly again as a mixed person the only play I have ever seen about a mixed Asian and white person was this off, off, off, off Broadway show called Asian Belle and that was empowering and seeing a mixed race actress, Monica Nichols in the lead role in My Fair Lady at Arena Stage was such an inspiring moment in my life to see for the first time someone who looked like me on stage in a leading part and then finally I was going to mention American Hwang Up by Lloyd Suh and part of like what he accomplished was that was a rolling world premiere so again that can help to build the canon if you have multiple productions but you have to like network with these various regional theaters in order to get that done. So I just wanted to address what you were saying about the extravagance of theater that you feel is missing from Asian America and doing art for art's sake, right? Is that worried about the ways we have to have to make ourselves legible and to justify ourselves and to even be on the scene? Right, oh yeah, well okay, so that's the point that I was gonna make is that none of us would be doing it if we weren't passionate about the art and so that I think that's there but I think a lot of times, especially in my market, we are prevented from doing it. It's just not acceptable. People won't do it unless we created ourselves and so we do have to bring some of those stories for our audience. I just wanted to say as an observer of the Mayi Theater Writers' Lab, which is mostly 30 something to 40 something Asian American playwrights, second, third generation writers, they don't concern themselves about being Asian American. They write about themes that interest them, whether it be, like I had said, children going into outer space because that's what somebody wants to write about or about a French monobotition that's called the La Triangle during the French Revolution, written by Korean American or whether it's about what microfinance or Jesus going to India, doesn't have to do with racial issues or with content or issues of discrimination, alienation and bigotry. I think the new Asian American playwright has gone beyond that, thankfully, and they're not writing what the grandparents would have written about how they, you know, they're no longer first generation immigrants and they are not caught in that trap of writing about their non-assimilation, thankfully. Yeah, I mean, actually, I didn't mean to suggest that the artists aren't doing this, but I feel like it's a way, I don't know, maybe it's, this is, sorry, I'm an academic, I don't actually know how these things happen, but it's a matter of, what, educating literary managers or, you know, artistic directors that if that's the argument that we keep having to make to get into the rotation, then that to me is the problem, right? It's like, I don't know how to change that, but I feel like for, you know, we keep having to come back and make these arguments about social justice and blah, blah, blah, and not on artistic merit when there's plenty of material that could actually be produced and based on artistic merit, you know what I mean? Or just the weirdness of it. And in terms of the kinds of texts that somebody was asking about, what sort of texts, I didn't know if you were asking about academic texts or dramatic texts, but I mean, for me, I think what I would love to see produced, and then again, it's not, I know that they're being written, it's just frustrating that they don't get produced as often as I'd like to see, are just texts of all kinds, not necessarily just by people of color, but texts that kind of destabilize everybody. Maybe it's my own personal aesthetic taste, but I feel like for my role as an educator, part of what I'm trying to do is educate audiences to take pleasure in being uncertain, or take pleasure in being confused, or to take pleasure in not looking for that satisfying resolution where it ended the way I thought it was gonna end. Right, that, to me, that's more, that's the bigger project, is getting people to understand that you can take pleasure in not having your worldview confirmed. And so that's not necessarily just about race, it's more like an aesthetic education of audiences, right? That it's okay to be confused and to find that fun, right? I don't know. So that's my job, and that's not your job, so sorry. Yeah. All right, well, let's go. I think it's just very important to keep creating work that has integrity and not, and yes, absolutely not to have to justify it on the basis of this is who I am, and this is what I must say because of who I am, but to be honest with oneself when creating work and not creating it for audience, because this is what is required of somebody like myself. So I think if, as artists, we have integrity, then we don't have to justify and we don't have to contextualize and we don't have to explain, we can just do the work and resist being pushed into corners and being labeled and being, and having our work analyzed through certain kinds of lenses. And that's really what my commitment to creating work is to resist that demand of this is where you come from and this is what we expect from you. You will shed light, and that is not my story because my story of growing up in the kind of home that I did in Karachi is not the story that I share with many other. It is my unique story, and as somebody in the audience just said, everybody has a story in multiplicity of experiences and as long as we are honest with that, I think that we can push our work. Well, thank you. On that deconstructive note of contesting terms, let's end our panel. I want to thank, once again, our panelists and wonderful audience for coming. Thank you so much. At the Asian Arts Initiative, we're really, really impressed and sorry I couldn't be there. Thank you, my including.