Anna Deavere Smith

Dr. Imani Kai Johnson, Assistant Professor of Dance at UC Riverside, reading comments by Anna Deavere Smith on Dr. Dorinne Kondo's book, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press)

Daniel Banks

In the spirit of the many dramaturgical letters you have written throughout your career, some of which you share in the book, as well as your deep dive into psychoanalysis, I thought it appropriate to engage in some playful mirroring, formalistically, and write my comments as a letter. However, my letter will not be so much dramaturgy as fan-boy. I don’t think you know this, but it was your visit to NYU when I was in graduate school that inspired me to finish writing my dissertation because of the depth of emotion and passion in your theoretical writing. For twenty years your writing has given me hope and, quite frankly, this book took that hope to a whole other level. Your self-described “ethnography of the theatre industry” is, for me, a cliff- hanger that I could not put down because I saw myself on every page in a way that few people have been able to represent. Sentences such as: “How specifically do we construct race in our everyday scholarly and artistic practice, and under what structural historical conditions?” and “How ‘universal’ and how racially unmarked is aesthetic form? How ‘universal’ is the even more fundamental binary of fiction/nonfiction?” (46) capture my day to day reality and my love-hate relationship with US theatre. And your explanation of worldmaking as “political action animated by political hope” could not be more timely.

To me, this book is an epic journey in multiple ways, but not the “hero’s journey” of the “Master narrative,” which you so importantly dismantle. You rigorously dissect how “aesthetic form enacts a power-sensitive politics,” not pretending that performance is in any way benign, culturally unmarked, or power neutral. At first, the book describes your relationship with theatre and how it has transformed, from critic, to dramaturg, to playwright, in an overlapping, intertwining dance, rather than a linear chronology.

Next, you weave an intricate critical web, bringing so many silenced perspectives downstage in full spotlight. With great courage you detail the “power relations in and around theatre.” When you write about “The artistic labor that makes, unmakes, and remakes race,” I want to cry, because if I hear one more person talk about invisible labor… Our labor is visible to those who care to see and acknowledge it; I see it. You see it. It is not invisible. It drains so many of us of life-force—the “vulnerability to premature death” that racism and other oppressive societal structures guarantees. When you discuss “reparative creativity,” which you describe as “acts of partial integration and repair,” I keep crying, because you have put into words what I and so many of my colleagues know to be true—against all odds somehow the ritual of theatre/dance/performance will, nay must, bring us back to a state of humanity that is so far buried beneath ash and carnage that our country can barely remember what it means to be connected to one another; that we are, genetically, kin. In your words, “Reparative creativity becomes a way to remake worlds.”

Finally, you take the reader on an emotional journey and insist on the role of emotion and fragility in both academic and artistic discourse. You banish the “tough it out” trope of the Master narrative and offer your reader a lens through which to reclaim the affective, the ontological, the sublime. There is such rigor in your exegesis of the history of thought as pertains to “corporeal epistemologies” that I would love to see someone try to argue with the relevance and urgency of reclaiming our affective bodies and experiences in the midst of mass shootings and daily physical and psychic violence. Like Cassandra, you wrote this book for this week, a week that has seen mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio. You knew what we needed to hear. You even completely flip the pro forma structure of the book’s acknowledgments to foreground the vulnerability within interconnectedness.

I found myself trying to underline the whole book, mic-drop moment after mic-drop moment—including such formulations as:

“If (racial) trauma has an afterlife—if structural racism persists in the very constitution of the subject, whether majoritarian or minoritarian—the postracial becomes an impossibility.” (210-11)

I see this book as joining a wave of critical narratives that do not pull their punches, sitting comfortably and productively next to Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown and Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva. You assert:

We cannot afford the life-diminishing trope of relentless recuperation. We need visions of possibility, a suggestion however fleeting, of a world imagined otherwise, so that we might attempt to remake the world accordingly, even as the world makes us. This is not soft-minded; it is a matter of political action. (91)

For future generations, this book will stand as testament to the fact that, despite what you describe as, “The dangers of liberal humanism and ‘power-evasive’ strategies for numbing the nation,” there was, in this era, intelligence and courage and a movement to transform the profane into the sacred. I thank you with all my heart for your labor, your creativity, and your commitment to truth and equity.

Book Nomination for American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize

We are writing to nominate Dorinne Kondo’s book, Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity for the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize.

This is Professor Kondo’s third book, Her first book, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace, published in 1990, received the J.I. Staley prize given by the School of American Research in 1999 for a book that has had a lasting impact on the field of Anthropology. Her second book, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, Routledge 1997, received the Association for Asian American Studies Book Prize in Cultural Studies. She has already received an extraordinary amount of recognition for the originality, breadth and influence of her scholarship.

This new work, however, is in many ways more innovative and boundary crossing that either of these two other books. It builds on twenty years of fieldwork not only as an ethnographer but also as a playwright and dramaturg, so rather than being a “participant-observer”, as anthropologists often like to describe themselves, she was a full participant in the creative process that she also writes about. She not only documents this process but theorizes about its goals, its methods, and the stakes involved not only in creating theater but also in living amidst the racial and cultural inequalities of the art world.

The key concept developed from the work of Melanie Klein and various queer theorists is the idea of “reparative creativity” — namely “the ways artists make, unmake, remake race in their creative processes, in acts always of partial integration and repair” (p. 5). This is a more complex concept than simply “healing’, since it is never fixed once and for all. Reparative creativity is at the same time a critical, political and artistic practice, which can only be understood and displayed in historically particular contexts.

The structure of the book itself mirrors a dramatic performance, since it starts with an Overture and then a brief Entr’act, and is followed by arguments divided into three acts: the Mise-en-Scène, Creative Labor and Reparative Creativity. The argument in the third act is also, in fact, a play: “Seamless”, a comic drama that reflects on the memory of Japanese incarceration and how this historical trauma has continued to affect generations born after the camps. This structure is both playful — in both senses of the word, “amusing” and “like a play” — and very serious, continuing a legacy of textual experimentation and innovation in both the format and the presentation of anthropological arguments.

The book conducts an ethnography of the backstage domain to argue that artists, including Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and herself, make and remake race through their creative processes, and that reparative creativity is a mode of affective redress. In doing so, it surveys the racial composition of the contemporary theater world, with particular attention to the lack of representation of Asian-Americans. Rather than just condemning this apparent invisibility, Kondo studies responses to it, and emphasizes the fact that as a live art, theater is almost never fully written — each play is re-edited, re-worked and re-performed on each stage and to a certain extent on each night that it is presented to an audience. The attention to the re-writing, the listening, and the re-working (in which she participated both as a dramaturg and as a playwright) is one of the great contributions of the book.

Although this is the work of a distinguished anthropologist, it clearly addresses an interdisciplinary audience, including drama and literary critics, theater professionals, theorists of race in American culture, and people who write about contemporary politics. There is also a much larger arts-attending public who will feel compelled by this book. A reading of the text’s internal play, “Seamless”, at USC this spring attracted an overflow audience, with many people turned away at the door. Reports from those who have already taught it in class indicate that it has quickly emerged as a key text and inspiration to many students. We expect that this will happen many more times in the future.

In sum, Worldmaking is a timely and multidimensional work, one that reflects the accumulated insights of a highly original and influential scholar. We enthusiastically nominate it for the AES Senior Prize.

Sincerely,

Janet Hoskins Professor of Anthropology University of Southern California

Peter Redfield Professor of Anthropology University of Southern California

Brian Herrera, #TheatreClique

Encourage Your Institutional Library to BUY THIS BOOK:

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Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press, 2018) • Among the most important and potentially far-reaching books of the last few years. The book blends Kondo’s scholarly training as an anthropologist with her longstanding professional practice as a dramaturg alongside her creative artistry as a playwright to offer a searching and incisive study of the racialized structures of inequity that configure contemporary theatre. Kondo’s deft balance of criticality, practicality and artistry makes this a rare gem of a scholarly book — a pleasure to read, a joy to teach, and a gift to fellow scholars and future researchers. (Indeed, in Theater & Society Now this week, we’ll be discussing Kondo’s second chapter on “Racialized Economies” alongside this stunner of a piece from Soraya Macdonald.) I do hope that you ask your institutional libraries to share the gift of Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking with your communities.