| This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the community of Theater Mu, an Asian American theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It urges a recognition of how ongoing Asian immigration into the United States challenges the current construction of the label of Asian American. Theater Mu is unique in the sense that it employs immigrant Asian artists and systematically incorporates Asian performing arts in an (Asian) American context. Furthermore, the study of a Midwestern Asian American theatre company compensates for the academic neglect of theatres positioned on the margins of Asian American cultural and historical formation. It also argues for the necessity of re-thinking "community" by calling attention to the "differences within" and by making visible unequal power relations within a marginalized community. By employing interviews with Theater Mu participants, performance and textual analysis, social and cultural theories, and participant-observation, the study presents multiple perspectives in reading Theater Mu's performances and in defining Asian, American, and Asian American.;The performances created and challenges confronted by Theater Mu are discussed in four chapters: Chapter 1, "The Narrative Production and Deconstruction of Home(s): Asian Indian Women in The Hand that Holds the String," discusses the positionalities of Asian immigrants who maintain their ties to Asia even when they are in the process of becoming American. Chapter 2, "The (Re)Definition of Cultural and Ethnic Identity: Korean Adoptees in Mask Dance and The Walleye Kid," re-examines concepts of race/ethnicity through the Korean adoptees' search for racial/ethnic identity and cultural/social belonging. Through the controversies involved with Theater Mu's production of Fax Shangri-La, Chapter 3, "The Limit of a Borderless World: Asian Asians vs. Asian Americans in the production of Fax Shangri-La," investigates theories of positionality, border-crossing, and transnationalism. With the understanding that "authenticity" is not an essence but rather a construct, Chapter 4, "The Problematic of Fusion between East (Asian) and West (Asian American): (In)Authenticity of the Asian Artists," discusses how authenticity creates anxiety and friction within the Asian American community and how the concept of authenticity can be strategically recuperated to formulate immigrant subjectivities. |
