When encountering non-Asians masquerading as Asians in yellowface in twenty-first-century stage musical performances, I feel righteously angry, profoundly sad, and racially alienated. Yet musical theatre promises pleasure and enables the disavowal of complicity with systemic racist violence, as patrons, performers, and producers use their enjoyment to rationalize racial hierarchy. How does racial identity shape reactions to musicals? In turn, how do these reactions shore up and take down structural racism? This article theorizes "feeling yellow," how Asian Americans are moved and made in response to representation. Though grounded in racial inequality and difference, feeling yellow ultimately wields the potential to generate new pleasures by using feminist, queer of color critique to redistribute misery and form communities of fellow feeling.
The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. InHamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography,Hamiltonfollows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”
In 2010, Arena Stage, the pioneering regional theatre of Washington, D.C., celebrated its sixtieth anniversary and new theatre complex with a multiracial production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! This production helped to rebrand the company as “Where American Theatre Lives” by mobilizing a popular musical of American nation-formation populated by multiracial territory folks on the frontier and in the nation’s capital. This essay argues that Arena’s production stages a utopian performative of inclusion and harmony, but that utopia troublingly rests on indigenous genocide and elision of racial difference and inequality. Both parts of this argument are crucial when many Americans openly celebrate diversity, but deny the structural significance of race and racism despite vast disparities. To understand how bodies become variously interpellated and interpreted into existing racial projects and the shifting (re)productions of Americanness, the essay theorizes three terms for the production and consumption of this Oklahoma! : multiracial-conscious , whitened , and post-racial . Spectators could view the territory folks as people of color, whites, and/or beyond race. The casting, marketing, and critical reception reveal the struggles for defining race and American identity at a moment when people of color appear to have significant representation, enabling a post-racial project in which many with privilege disavow that privilege and perpetuate existing inequities.
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