by Josephine Lee

About Josephine Lee

Josephine Lee is Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is author of The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (2010) and Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (1997). She has co-edited (with R. A. Shiomi and Don Eitel) Asian American Plays for a New Generation (2011) and (with Imogene Lim and Yuko Matsukawa) Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History (2002).

Performance

book Keywords for Asian American Studies

“Performance” can mean the everyday accomplishment of a task or function, or acting in special contexts such as plays, music, or sports. The first meaning links “performance” to the fulfillment of social roles; in both cases, instances of “performance” reference and reiterate the conventions of meaning that define communities, societies, or nations (“as American as [eating] apple pie”). Scholars have adopted the term “performative” (derived from language philosopher J. L. Austin’s “performative utterance” in How to Do Things with Words [1962]) to good effect in analyzing the everyday enactments that constitute aspects of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and race (Butler 1988; Parker and Sedgwick 1995). These understandings of “performance” and its variants are tied to what Erving Goffman (1959) called the “presentation of self”: how words and actions manifest human signification, relationship, status, and power.