Dorinne Kondo draws on critical ethnographic work and over twenty years of experience as a dramaturge and playwright to theorize how racialized labor, aesthetics, affect, genre, and social inequity operate in contemporary theater.
In this bold, innovative work, Dorinne Kondo theorizes the racialized structures of inequality that pervade theater and the arts. Grounded in twenty years of fieldwork as dramaturg and playwright, Kondo mobilizes critical race studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and dramatic writing to trenchantly analyze theater's work of creativity as theory: acting, writing, dramaturgy. Race-making occurs backstage in the creative process and through economic forces, institutional hierarchies, hiring practices, ideologies of artistic transcendence, and aesthetic form. For audiences, the arts produce racial affect--structurally over-determined ways affect can enhance or diminish life. Upending genre through scholarly interpretation, vivid vignettes, and Kondo's original play, Worldmaking journeys from an initial romance with theater that is shattered by encounters with racism, toward what Kondo calls reparative creativity in the work of minoritarian artists Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and the author herself. Worldmaking performs the potential for the arts to remake worlds, from theater worlds to psychic worlds to worldmaking visions for social transformation.
“" Worldmaking is a stunning contribution to discussions of racial representation, affect, ethnography, and practice-led research in our post-racial world. Working to 'defamiliarize' American theatre for artists and scholars, the book re-evaluates the dichotomies of theory/practice, artistic passion/compensation, and resistance/complicity that are firmly ingrained in our thinking about the arts. The rigour with which Kondo encourages us to reassess artistic practices and scholarly enquiry, however, never verges on harsh criticism. Instead, it is with stirring generosity that she opens up avenues for further enquiry and redress."”
"A timely publication. . . [that] keenly reflects the complexity and entanglements of race, history, politics, representation and contemporary identities in North America." - David J. Scott (The Australian Journal of Anthropology) "Working across disciplines, Kondo reverses the imperative of many scholars to read theory onto performance by instead focusing on the emergence of theory in theater, how it is deployed by theater artists and comes into contact with audiences. . . . For theater makers, Worldmaking serves as another kind of reparative, as it de-centers Eurocentric theatrical models in exchange for processes that enact the minoritarian, the non-hegemonic, the reparative." - Kristen Holfeuer (Women & Performance)
“This book … suits courses on theatre, race, and performance, and on ethnographic methods. Crucially, this book expands necessary conversations on race and dramaturgy, and ways in which ‘dramaturgical critique’-conscious of racial logics and embodied meanings-might make and repair theatrical and racial worlds.”
- Jasmine Mahmoud (TDR: The Drama Review) “Worldmaking is a stunning contribution to discussions of racial representation, affect, ethnography, and practice-led research in our post-racial world. Working to ‘defamiliarize’ American theatre for artists and scholars, the book re-evaluates the dichotomies of theory/practice, artistic passion/compensation, and resistance/complicity that are firmly ingrained in our thinking about the arts. The rigour with which Kondo encourages us to reassess artistic practices and scholarly enquiry, however, never verges on harsh criticism. Instead, it is with stirring generosity that she opens up avenues for further enquiry and redress.” - Jessica Nakamura (Modern Drama) “Kondo demonstrates the power of theatre to address the complexities of race in contemporary America not only through what is seen onstage but also in the processes of rehearsal, revision, and reception, as artists question representational authority and negotiate collaboration.”Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and Anthropology at the University of Southern California and author of About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater and Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace.
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