Christine Bacareza Balance

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

California Dreaming is a multi-genre collection featuring works by Asian American artists based in California. Exploring the places of “Asian America” through the migration and circulation of the arts, this volume highlights creative processes and the flow of objects to understand the rendering of California’s imaginary. Here, “California” is interpreted as both a specific locale and an identity marker that moves, linking the state’s cultural imaginary, labor, and economy with Asia Pacific, the Americas, and the world. Together, the works in this collection shift previous models and studies of the “Golden State” as the embodiment of “frontier mentality” and the discourse of exceptionality to a translocal, regional, and archipelagic understanding of place and cultural production. The poems, visual essays, short stories, critical essays, interviews, artist statements, and performance text excerpts featured in this collection expand notions of where knowledge is produced, directing our attention to the particularity of California’s landscape and labor in the production of arts and culture. An interdisciplinary collection, California Dreaming foregrounds “sensing” and “imagining” place, vividly, as it hopes to inspire further creative responses to the notion of emplacement. In doing so, California Dreaming explores the possibilities imagined by and through Asian American arts and culture today, paving the way for what is yet to be.

Movement and Place in the Asian American Imaginary

California Dreaming

Winner of the 2012 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies, Association for Asian American Studies Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means “pure art.” In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors in Miss Saigon. Using this varied archive, Puro Arte turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.

Filipinos on the Stages of Empire

Puro Arte

Roberta Uno

The Color of Theater presents a range of essays, interviews and performance texts that illustrate and examine the process, evolution and dynamics of making theater in the dawning moments of the 21st century. It brings together writings by artists, intellectuals and art activists exploring contemporary practices within multicultural, intercultural and ethnically specific theaters. This provocative and dynamic resource brings forth critical issues of cultural aesthetics engaging theater as a crucial site for examining the intricate intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and national and global politics.Contributors include: Rustom Bharucha, Thulani Davis, Harry Elam, Guillermo Gomez-Pea, Velina Hasu Huston, Cherrfe Moraga, David Romn, Sekou Sundiata, Diana Taylor, Una Chaudhuri, Alberto Sandoval-Snchez and lO thi diem thy.

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

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