From the Peter Neil Isaacs collection.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

The International Shakespeare Association meeting, held in Tokyo in August of 1991, was regarded by many of the participating academics as a milestone in terms of the quality of the papers given and extent to which the intercultural and cross-cultural study of Shakespeare had been developed. This volume contains the principal contributions (10) to the panel on Acting and Language in Shakespeare and Eastern Drama, specially edited for publication by Minoru Fujita who teaches at the Graduate School of Culture, University of Osaka, and Leonard Pronko, Professor of Theatre at Pomona College, Claremont, California. The papers are presented in three sections: Playhouses and Performances, Literary History, and Interpretation and Theoretical Issues.

In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. Roxworthy demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged, the authentic experience from the political display, grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic, and they continue to reenact this trauma in public and private to this day. The political spectacles staged by the FBI and the American mass media were heir to a theatricalizing discourse that can be traced back to Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853. Westerners, particularly Americans, drew upon it to orientalize—disempower, demonize, and conquer—those of Japanese descent, who were characterized as natural-born actors who could not be trusted. Roxworthy provides the first detailed reconstruction of the FBI’s raids on Japanese American communities, which relied on this discourse to justify their highly choreographed searches, seizures, and arrests. Her book also makes clear how wartime newspapers (particularly those of the notoriously anti-Asian Hearst Press) melodramatically framed the evacuation and internment so as to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with their former neighbors of Japanese descent. Roxworthy juxtaposes her analysis of these political spectacles with the first inclusive look at cultural performances staged by issei and nisei (first- and second-generation Japanese Americans) at two of the most prominent “relocation centers”: California’s Manzanar and Tule Lake. The camp performances enlarge our understanding of the impulse to create art under oppressive conditions. Taken together, wartime political spectacles and the performative attempts at resistance by internees demonstrate the logic of racial performativity that underwrites American national identity. The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma details the complex formula by which racial performativity proved to be a force for both oppression and resistance during World War II.

The first book of its kind: a collection of the most important genres of Japanese performance--noh, kyogen, kabuki, and puppet theater--in one comprehensive, authoritative volume.

This volume featrues over 250,000 words and more than 125 photographs identifying and defining theatre in more than 30 countries from India to Uzbekistan, from Thailand to New Zealand and featuring extensive documentation on contemporary Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Australian theatre.