Colleen Kim Daniher

This essay closely examines the extant visual archive surrounding nineteenth-century Mohawk poet-performer E. Pauline Johnson to argue that her gestural and sartorial aesthetics situate her within a transnational genealogy of American Delsartism, a turn-of-the-century literary, cultural, and kinesthetic movement closely tied to a bodily discourse of white bourgeois femininity. Drawing links across a diverse array of visual and textual archival documents, the essay deploys a methodology of performance reconstruction that newly calls attention to the importance of Johnson’s rhetoric of gesture amid her prevailing reception and interpretation as a poet in voice and paper only. By situating her costumed elocutionary poetry performances (1892–1909) within an expressive tradition of women’s Delsartean recitation and posing in North America (1880–1920), the essay historicizes the close links between literary and performance cultures during the nineteenth century, as well as intervenes in a primitivist critical tendency to interpret Indigenous performance gestures as natural and therefore outside the domains of the rhetorical, the theatrical, and the aesthetic. As a result, the essay establishes new links among cultural histories of American theatre and dance, transnational modernisms, and Indigenous popular performance in North America.

This article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends Daniher put a comparative Asian North American method into practice in her classroom on Asian American Theatre and Performance Studies at Brown University in Spring 2016. In particular, Daniher focuses on pairing Ins Choi’s play-text Kim’s Convenience (2011) alongside a viewing of the made-for-PBS broadcast of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (2001) in order to broach the topic of anti-Black racism in both Canada and the US in the Black Lives Matter moment. Although Daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a US-American institutional setting, she directs the following emergent queries to the field of Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies: How should we frame Asian Canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? For what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in Canada? Drawing on overlapping genealogies of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies, Daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if Asian Canadian Theatre Studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “Asian Canadian studies projects” writ-large.

In this article, I argue that high(bridi)tea issues an important challenge to the developmental narratives of both dominant and “marginal” accounts of Canadian history and memory, including a still-formulating, pan-ethnic “Asian Canadian” history and memory that has been in the process of unfolding since the late 1960s (Day 2006; see also Li 2007 and Watada 1999). Developed and presented at the turn of the twenty-first century, after the federal government’s 1988 apology for Japanese Canadian internment but before apologies for restricting and then eventually barring Chinese immigration to Canada from 1885-1947, high(bridi)tea recalls the painful multigenerational effects of national exclusion and internment on Chinese and Japanese Canadian subjects during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, as a participatory performance event staged around the rituals of presenting, serving, and consuming tea in real-time, high(bridi)tea articulates this history not just along the lines of narrative or thematic content, but through an embodied and social relational exploration of the high tea service as commemorative cultural ceremony in the present (Connerton 1989).

This article investigates mid-century singer/dancer/actor Eartha Kitt’s ambiguous racial aesthetics, which ran the gamut from Eastern and Western Oriental sound and embodiment in dance, Afro-Latina voicings in song, and feline impersonation. Borrowing a figure from music theory, I call this performative aesthetic strategy “racial modulation.” I argue that while Kitt’s staged modulations of the black/white yella gal into “international” registers subverted white audience’s assumed access to Kitt’s performing body, it also forged intimacies and associations with Asia and Latin America—geographies that, at the height of Kitt’s career, were implicitly linked to both US Cold War imperialism and Third World decolonizing movements.

This article investigates the decolonial politics of the pose in the photographic and installation work of mixed-race Native Alaskan artist Erica Lord. Refiguring the pose as decolonial gesture, I argue that Lord's poses can be understood as decolonial labor because of the ways in which they employ messy genealogies of colonial space and time in order to disrupt the linear unfolding of white settler colonial history. In the act of posing, Lord intervenes in a visual and historical archive that positions both Native and mixed race subjects—especially women—as particularly vulnerable subjects to the ongoing Western imperial project of assimilationist inclusion. Lord's photographic poses enact a literal seizure of time that resists both the presumed past-ness of the Native American and the presumed futurity of the racially-ambiguous, mixed race woman. In so doing, she revises the temporal politics of both, critically calling into question " the proper " subject of memory.