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