entertainment. This book submits that aesthetic practices directly contribute to the shaping of these formations by serving as vessels for the mediation of legal, political, historical, national, and racial knowledge. A Race So Different analyzes racial formation through the lens of performance in order to historicize and explicate the legal and cultural mechanisms responsible for the production of racial meaning in and on the Asian American body. Bringing a performance studies perspective to bear on the study of Asian American racial formation, I suggest that it is in the places where “social structure” (the law) and “cultural representation” (performance aesthetics) become most deeply entangled on the body that they assume their greatest significance.
Interdisciplinary scholarship about law and performance has, to date, often distinguished the realm of legal ritual from the domain of aesthetic practices. Legal scholarship about performance traditionally focuses narrowly on First Amendment jurisprudence, copyright, or entertainment contract law, while theater and performance scholarship usually frames the law as either a narrative theme or part of the social/historical background against which performance occurs.12 This book joins an emerging body of performance studies literature that focuses on the intersection between state politics, law, and performance, most recently in the pathbreaking work of Tony Perucci and Catherine Cole.13 Perucci’s study of Paul Robeson’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities demonstrates the ways in which performance can be mobilized by the state as “the field upon which politics is enacted” as well as the means by which a figure such as Robeson can deploy performance in order to disrupt “the containment of the theatrical frame secured and held at bay by” the government.14 While the relationship between aesthetics and the performance of politics is important to Perucci’s analysis, his primary focus is on the staging and disruption of political power, rather than the law as such. In turn, Cole observes that theater and performance scholars have generally approached the study of legal phenomena, such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, by focusing “on theatrical or aesthetic representations of the commission rather than on the commission itself as performance.”15 She calls on performance studies scholars to bring their expertise to the study of law as performance in order to open up a more robust understanding of legal procedure’s social function. At the same time, by doing so, Cole largely (and understandably) moves away from the analysis of aesthetic objects.16
The present study insists that partitioned critical approaches that focus on either legal ritual or aesthetic practices cannot adequately account for the fact that (1) there is an aesthetics to the law, including performance conventions and theatricality, and (2) performance, theater, and art often function as agents of the law. Because performances are embodied acts that occur in quotidian and aesthetic arenas, regularly blurring the spaces between them, the performance studies approach of A Race So Different allows us to understand the process of legal racialization without privileging the law over cultural production, or vice versa. That is, through the lens of performance theory, we can begin to see how racialization occurs in the critical space where law and performance coexist across the individual subject’s body and in the cultural bloodstream of the body politic. As such, this book demonstrates how a performance studies approach to racial formation that accounts for the concurrence of law, politics, and performance aesthetics can contribute to a more robust understanding of the construction of social and racial realities in the contemporary United States.
In the remainder of this introduction, I articulate the key terms and concepts that frame this study. I show how the law is (1) performative, (2) structured by acts of performance, and (3) mediated through aesthetic performance pieces. Like Bashir, Asian Americans are interpellated into a form of legal subjectivity that is figured as simultaneously included within and excluded from the normative application of the law. I describe this as a state of racial exception. I show how the law does more than project this curious juridical status onto Asian American bodies; it calls on the Asian American subject to perform in a fashion that confirms his or her exceptional racial subjectivity. To be clear, this book does not aim to prove the existence of racial exception. Theories of a simultaneously interior and exterior national subjectivity have already been established in the previous literature on Asian American racialization.17 Rather, I take the racially exceptional status of Asian Americans as a point of departure in order to demonstrate the mutually implicated role of law and performance in the making of Asian American subjectivity as such. In doing so, I hope to show how the lens of performance can help us to better understand Asian American racial formation in three key ways: (1) it gives us a frame for the historicization of the process of Asian American racialization; (2) it provides us with tools for complicating and contesting Asian American subjectification and subjection; and (3) it highlights the critical role that the racialization of Asian and Asian American subjects continues to play in the racial, political, and legal order of the United States.
Performance Variations
Throughout what follows, I use the term performance in an expansive fashion to describe embodied acts of self-presentation. This use is aligned with Erving Goffman’s definition of performance as “all the activity of a given participant on a given occasion which serves to influence in any way any of the other participants.”18 This broad definition allows us to think of a wide range of presentational and communicative behaviors as performance. This is particularly useful in a study of the law, given the law’s reliance on forms of ritual or legal habitus. Of course, the law is also performative, which is to say that the law is structured by series of speech acts that produce a doing in the world. But this doing ties the performativity of the law to performance insofar as legal performativity is given form when the law manifests itself in and on the body through expressive acts. The spaces of everyday life are stages on which people perform for the law and, as such, become subject to the law. But if we are to think of performance in such a broad fashion, how can we differentiate between specific modalities of performance? How can we account for the difference between the representational acts of a lawyer before a military tribunal in Guantánamo and Cowhig’s fictional representation of one Guantánamo detainee’s life?
Even in the expansive use of the term performance, it carries a trace of its commonsense root: dramatic or theatrical aesthetics. This book does not set out to clarify the difference between quotidian forms of performance and aesthetic forms. Rather, it shows how the confusion between the two plays a significant role in the exercise of the law and in the making of legal and racial subjectivity. For definitional clarity, I describe everyday acts of self-presentation, including legal habitus, with the term quotidian performance. In turn, performances that are characterized by their nature as aesthetic works of cultural production are referred to as aesthetic performances. This includes theatrical works such as Lidless as well as performance art and popular music. The term is also used to discuss objects normally assessed within the frame of visual culture, such as a website or a series of photographs. Such objects may serve to document past performances or function as performances in their own right. Aesthetic performances are usually a step removed from everyday forms of self-presentation and are often self-consciously representational in nature. Audiences and spectators are meant to encounter them as aesthetic experiences.
This book is made up of a series of critical cross-maneuvers, navigating through various phenomena including legal performatives and legal rituals, acts of political and legal self-presentation by Asian American subjects, and Asian American aesthetic practices. In moving between and across these spaces, the reader will note that the distinction between quotidian performance and aesthetic performance is at times muddied and collapses entirely at other times. A Race So Different emphasizes the points at which the distinction between the legal and the aesthetic break down, pushing against the strict division or opposition of the two that is sometimes maintained by traditional disciplinary approaches in both the humanities and the social sciences. By organizing my study under a broad definition of performance, while attending to the specific impact of different modalities of performance, I aim to demonstrate not simply that the law has both a performative and an aesthetic dimension but that aesthetic performances often take on a legal function by serving as agents of
