Reviews The publisher, Routledge; Contact:
Alli Hirschman; Associate Publicist; E-Mail: hirschman@routledge.com , December
9, 1997
From the runways of Paris to the Broadway stage, from a Comme
des Garcons fashion show to Miss Saigon, from glossy fashion magazine layouts to
local college protests, ABOUT FACE: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater
(Routledge; October 13, 1997; $17.95; a paperback original) examines
performances of "race" -- specifically the ways that representations of Asia
reverberate in Asian and Asian American lives. Author Dorinne Kondo examines the
use of race, gender, nationality and sexuality stereotypes in Japanese
"avant-garde" high fashion and Asian American theater, appraising
representations of and assumptions about Orientalism and its place in world
culture. Based on Kondo's fieldwork, this innovative book brings together
essays, vignettes, and interviews with playwright David Henry Hwang and designer
Rei Kawakubo. The interviews provoke an illuminating discussion of how Asian
identity is used and misused in popular culture and show how cultural
perceptions and misperceptions are expressed and overturned in performance. A
provocatively genre-bending text, ABOUT FACE considers where representations in
fashion and theater industries effect considerations of ethnography, feminist
and minority issues, and popular culture. So compelling a piece of work, ABOUT
FACE will attract a wide audience in fashion, theater, popular culture, cultural
politics, race issues, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies,
Performance Studies and Drama, Asian Studies, critical race theory, and feminist
theory.Dorinne Kondo, an anthropologist and feminist scholar, is the author of
Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese
Workplace. She was a dramaturge on the world premiere of Anna Deavere Smith's
play Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and was
represented as a character in Twilight at the New York Shakespeare Festival and
the Cort Theater on Broadway. She is also an aspiring playwright.
