Reading, Q and A.

Refreshments will be served.
This event is free and open to the public.

“The Face Behind the Paper”: Race, Casting, and Suspicion

This talk will explore the relationship between the unusual casting notes for Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher and performances of the play. It proposes that the disjuncture between script and performance stages a confrontation among an insistence on colorblindness, the tenacity of suspicion's attachment to racialized bodies, and the seemingly paranoid responses prompted by the convergence of these two forces.

Ju Yon Kim is a Professor of English at Harvard University. She is the author of The Racial Mundane: Asian American Performance and the Embodied Everyday (NYU Press, 2015), which received the 2016 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association for best book in American studies published in 2015 by a New England area scholar. She is currently working on a book project titled Paper Performance: Suspicion and the Spaces of Asian American Theater.