No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater

No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater
ISBN-10
0472051210
ISBN-13
9780472051212
Series
No Safe Spaces
Category
Performing Arts
Pages
305
Language
English
Published
2010-10-25
Publisher
University of Michigan Press
Author
Angela C. Pao

Description

"Non-traditional casting, increasingly practiced in American theater, is both deeply connected to our country's racial self-image(s) and woefully under-theorized. Angela Pao takes on the practice in its entirety to disentangle the various strands of this vitally important issue." ---Karen Shimakawa, New York University No Safe Spaces looks at one of the most radical and enduring changes introduced during the Civil Rights era---multiracial and cross-racial casting practices in American theater. The move to cast Latino/a, African-American, and Asian-American actors in classic stage works written by and about white Europeans and Americans is viewed as both a social and political gesture and an artistic innovation. Non-traditionally cast productions are shown to have participated in the national dialogue about race relations and ethnic identity and served as a source of renewed creativity for the staging of the canonical repertory. The book opens with a historical overview of multiracial casting, considering the artistic, political, and pragmatic dimensions of nontraditional approaches to casting. Two subsequent chapters examine non-traditional casting in terms of the relationship between reality and stage representation being assumed by various theatrical genres and in the context of the process of racial formation in the United States. The remaining chapters focus on case studies from the dominant genres of twentieth-century American theater: classical tragedy and drama, modern domestic drama, anti-realist drama, and the Broadway musical. Angela C. Pao is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University. She is the author of The Orient of the Boulevards: Exoticism, Empire and Nineteenth-Century French Theater.

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