Metzger
Biographic Data
| ID | 6538 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Metzger |
| FAMILY NAME | Metzger |
| SIGNATURE | METZGER |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7588-2624 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Racial Capitalism, Refugee Adjudication, and the Performances of Zama Zama
This essay investigates the category of the refugee as an instantiation of racial capitalism. To illustrate this conjunction, it first examines international law that defines refugees and, then, looks to specific national jurisprudence that accords different recognition to them. The national contexts discussed are the United States, given that the racial discourse there serves as a ground for the most widely known theorization of racial capitalis…
Drifting in this Dark Space: A Conversation with Artist Dinh Q. Lê
Drifting in this Dark Space”A Conversation with Artist Dinh Q. Lê Sean Metzger (bio) and Dinh Q. Lê Dinh Q. Lê’s art confronts viewers not only with the presence and memory of refugees, but also the processes of visualization that render such a category legible. Deftly moving between and combining craft, photography, and video, Lê’s body of work has consistently probed how both American and Vietnamese media picture and narrate Vietnam and Cambodi…
Afterword: Performance Studies Reorient
Drawing on the print contributions to the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of Theatre Journal , this essay argues for a performance studies reorient. Rather than stabilize the field, this gambit attempts to encourage continual disciplinary reinvention that would expand the parameters of critical concern as theatre and performance studies scholars attend to widening geographies, new modes of historiography, and theoretical innovations. Emphasizing …
Telling Our Own Stories: A Conversation with Writers Melissa Li and Kit Yan
Voices of heterosexual white women have proliferated through the viral circulation of #MeToo. Notwithstanding the importance of highlighting misogyny and sexual violence within industries that frequently capitalize on women’s performing bodies, the movement has sometimes obscured queer, kink, trans, and other articulations of desire that fall outside of heteronormativity. What possibilities for political collaboration lie outside of affinity with…
A Period of Extreme Uncertainty: A Conversation on Pandemic Theatre by Aapi Companies in California
A Period of Extreme Uncertainty":A Conversation on Pandemic Theatre by AAPI Companies in California Janine Sun Rogers (bio) and Sean Metzger (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to theatre, but it has also ushered in a wave of innovation.1 In its wake, performance-makers have reimagined the relationships between artists and communities and rethought the long histories of racialized violence many companies were formed t…
Vampiric Fashion: Chinese Circulation, Cinema, and Clothing on Screen and off
Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”) turns on the novelty of casting Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) into an updated version of Musidora, a silent film actress whose career is associated with silent serials of Louis Feuillade. This much discussed transformation requires in the director’s vision a shift from Musidora’s silk body suit to a latex one. Ostensibly such a transformation helps to mark France’…
Darkness is the degree to which the state can have their way with you: A Conversation between Artist, Curator, and Writer Christopher Cozier and Sean Metzger
Darkness is the degree to which the state can have their way with you”: A Conversation between Artist, Curator, and Writer Christopher Cozier and Sean Metzger Christopher Cozier (bio) and Sean Metzger (bio) The special issue of Theatre Journal on “shootings” prompted consideration of the recently reinvigorated Black Lives Matter protests at a transnational scale. These events revealed current as well as historical tensions between actual shooting…
Prayin' for queer times: Choir Boy and enactments of transient performance
Prayin' for Queer Times: Choir Boy and Enactments of Transient Performance" serves as an introduction to this special issue of Cultural Dynamics on Transient Performance. Using a young, queer black man's coming-of-age story at an African American all-boys prep school as a point of departure, the article elaborates transient performance as a new analytic that can account for the intersections of transnational movement, performance, geography, blac…
Concerning the queer refugee: Staceyann Chin's transient performance
Poet, performance artist, and activist, Staceyann Chin has created with her daughter Zuri an on-line "Living Room Protest" series. This work provides a focus to discuss the queer refugee and facilitates a broader inquiry into the spatial and temporal dimensions of transient performance as expressed through a digital platform. The Chins' collaboration destabilizes assumed oppositions between child and adult, public and private, citizen and refugee…
Oriental Sensitivity: Towards a Poetics of Global Studies
This essay elaborates “Oriental sensitivity” as a methodology for studying Chinese cultural flows in locations outside of that nation-state as an index of globalization. The article specifically draws on research that investigates the practice of tai chi on Martinique in dialogue with a larger discourse of Chinese currents in the Atlantic. Oriental sensitivity expands but also specifies Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism in relation to several o…
We're in for a future of provocateurs: An Interview with David Yee on Asian Canadian Theatre
We’re in for a future of provocateurs”: An Interview with David Yee on Asian Canadian Theatre Sean Metzger (bio) and David Yee (bio) In a New York Times article from May 21, 2020, poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong lamented the “nine productions of works by playwrights of Asian descent that were cut short or canceled in New York City . . . because of Covid-19.”1 Of course, the pandemic resulted in cancelations or postponements of productions all o…
I Teach the Audience How to Watch My Shows: An Interview with Kristina Wong
I Teach the Audience How to Watch My Shows”: An Interview with Kristina Wong Sean Metzger (bio) and Kristina Wong (bio) When I conceived of the Theatre Journal special issue on Minor Asias, artist Kristina Wong came immediately to mind because of work she had done in Uganda and her embodied political performance as an elected official in Los Angeles. Then COVID-19 and the latest wave of Black Lives Matter protests delayed the interview, and in th…
Imaging and Imagining the Chinese Caribbean: Jeanette Kong, Maria Lau, and Laura Fong Prosper
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the PacificTranspacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural NetworkInvisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature
This trio of books pulls together several strands of intellectual inquiry across academic disciplines. As a set, they nevertheless converge in their elaboration of what might be called a history of transpacific or a prehistory of Asian American literature, not so much in terms of opening an archive but instead in questioning the value and boundaries of canonical inclusion. In this regard, each work implicitly or explicitly asks how Asian American…
Ocean Crafts and Chinese Junk: Keywords for Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
Seismic Shifts: Leading Change in the American Theater
Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves: Screening human traffic and the logic of ebbing
Perhaps, as Michaeline Crichlow suggests, art might be the best vehicle to apprehend the process of human traffic since it can capture the rich dimensionality of this phenomenon. 1 Whereas journalistic coverage might emphasize economic determinism and the inequities of human rights in terms of both definition and distribution, art foregrounds issues like representation and the conditions that enable intelligibility. How do media forms shift not o…
La Cabine d’Essayage (The Fitting Room): Cheryl Sim
Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism
Book Review| June 01 2015 Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. By Cruz, Denise. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2012. xii, 296 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95.Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. By Duong, Lan P.. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. 2009. ix, 264 p…
An Inseparable Couple
Book Review| January 01 2015 An Inseparable Couple Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias. Lim, Eng-Beng. New York: New York University Press, 2014. xxii + 233 pp. Sean Metzger Sean Metzger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2015) 21 (1): 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2818576 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon …
Performing the Angel Island Centennial: Chinese Migration, Insular Intimacy and Fugitive Temporality
This article investigates the centenary celebrations of the Angel Island immigration station (off the coast of California) in order to think through how this site configures the island in relation to issues of Chinese migration, time and tourism. Moving through four interrelated performance events – a dance-theatre piece, the tour of the station, theatrical re-enactments of detainee interviews and the exhibition of a junk – the author identifies …
Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel Pioneer Per…
Book Review| June 01 2014 Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. By Ehlers, Nadine. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 2012. x, 185 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $25.00.American Po…
Mifune and Me: Asian/American Corporeal Citations and the Politics of Mobility
This essay examines the relationships of performing bodies to elaborate “Asian/American corporeal citations” and argues that such citations create the grounds for a politics of mobility. Revisiting and extending Sau-ling Wong’s theoretical engagement with “myths of mobility,” it specifically uses the nexus of mourning, performance, and racialization to rearticulate modes of cultural passing by constructing a lineage through several men: screen st…
Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
Book Review| December 01 2011 Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. By Miller, Monica L.. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2009. xiii, 390 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95.Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class. By Thompson, Lisa B.. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2009. xi, 183 pp. $40.00. Sea…
At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique
This essay elaborates a notion of a "subjectless" Asian/American critique, following the work of Kandice Chuh and others but in relation to the specific aesthetic devices available through the theater. This Asian/American critique builds on a Deleuzian relationality specifically developed through a formalist interpretation of playwright Naomi Iizuka's 36 Views and At the Vanishing Point . By placing Asian American studies, theater, and the Deleuz…
Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Asian bodies on US stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes.1 I group such codes—conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey "Asian-ness"—under the term yellowface performance. Actors in yellowface, such as Luise Rain…
Performing the Angel Island Centennial: Chinese Migration, Insular Intimacy and Fugitive Temporality
This article investigates the centenary celebrations of the Angel Island immigration station (off the coast of California) in order to think through how this site configures the island in relation to issues of Chinese migration, time and tourism. Moving through four interrelated performance events – a dance-theatre piece, the tour of the station, theatrical re-enactments of detainee interviews and the exhibition of a junk – the author identifies …
Questioning Freedoms in the Atlantic World
Farewell My Fantasy
In this essay, I seek to place Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine not solely within the Chinese matrix of its production but within the transnational matrix of its distribution and viewing; indeed, the film may well have been intended for international audiences, to which the film's numerous awards testify. Yet China, too, has been fascinated with Western ideas, with Freud one particular example. So here I use a Freudian interpretation of the fil…
Yohen (review)
Farewell My Fantasy
In this essay, I seek to place Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine not solely within the Chinese matrix of its production but within the transnational matrix of its distribution and viewing; indeed, the film may well have been intended for international audiences, to which the film's numerous awards testify. Yet China, too, has been fascinated with Western ideas, with Freud one particular example. So here I use a Freudian interpretation of the fil…
Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theatre (review)
Within the context of increasing transnationalism and moves toward globalization, notions of nationhood and citizenship have gained currency. Mason and Gainor's edited anthology examines these problematics through the analysis of how various performances construct the United States and concomitant conceptions of Americaness from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Ambitious but uneven, Mason and Gainor's collection provides a usefu…
Ice Queens, Rice Queens, and Intercultural Investments in Zhang Yimou's Turandot
Stage director Zhang Yimou's production of Turandot in the Forbidden City in Beijing was a spectacle of excess. Sean Metzger analyzes the staging of this theatrical event and the investments that fueled its production
Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Asian bodies on US stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes.1 I group such codes—conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey "Asian-ness"—under the term yellowface performance. Actors in yellowface, such as Luise Rain…
Patterns of Resistance?: Anna May Wong and the Fabrication of China in American Cinema of the Late 30s
The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity; Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement; Performance …
Book Review| December 01 2007 The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity; Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement; Performance in America: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the Performing Arts Sean Metzger Sean Metzger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (4): 833–835. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029…
Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture; Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War
Book Review| March 01 2007 Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture; Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War Sean Metzger Sean Metzger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2007) 79 (1): 201–203. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2006-085 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Fa…
Embodying Asian/American Sexualities
Chapter 1 1. Embodying Asian/American Sexualities Chapter 2 2. The Rice Room: Scenes from a Bar Chapter 3 3. Pornography and Its Dis/Contents: A Roundtable Discussion with Anjali Arondekar, Richard Fung, and Sylvia Chong Chapter 4 4. The One That She Wants: Margaret Cho, Mediatization, and Autobiographical Performance Chapter 5 5. Novell-Aah!: A Short Play Chapter 6 6. And the Crow Cries Before He Dies: A Brandon Lee Spoken Word Soliloquy Chapter…
Futures of Chinese cinema: Technologies and temporalities in Chinese screen cultures
With the burgeoning interest in Chinese film, this interdisciplinary collection investigates how new technologies, changing production constraints and shifting viewing practices have shaped perceptions of Chinese cinema. It contains essays submitted by international scholars for a workshop held the University of New South Wales in 2006 to consider new directions in Chinese cinema. After the devastation of the economic crisis, the uncertainty of t…
Questioning Freedoms in the Atlantic World
Unsettling: Towards a Chinese/Cuban Cultural Critique
This article elaborates a Chinese/Cuban cultural critique that operates through the notion of unsettling in light of recent work in Asian American studies and Chinese diaspora studies. Examining three case studies-Carlos Felipe's play The Chinaman ( El Chino), Rigoberto López's documentary The Longest Journey ( El Viaje Más Largo), and Michael Mann's feature film Miami Vice-the author suggests that these examples of expressive culture function as…
Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity
Book Review| December 01 2011 Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. By Miller, Monica L.. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2009. xiii, 390 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95.Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class. By Thompson, Lisa B.. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press. 2009. xi, 183 pp. $40.00. Sea…
At the Vanishing Point: Theater and Asian/American Critique
This essay elaborates a notion of a "subjectless" Asian/American critique, following the work of Kandice Chuh and others but in relation to the specific aesthetic devices available through the theater. This Asian/American critique builds on a Deleuzian relationality specifically developed through a formalist interpretation of playwright Naomi Iizuka's 36 Views and At the Vanishing Point . By placing Asian American studies, theater, and the Deleuz…
Mifune and Me: Asian/American Corporeal Citations and the Politics of Mobility
This essay examines the relationships of performing bodies to elaborate “Asian/American corporeal citations” and argues that such citations create the grounds for a politics of mobility. Revisiting and extending Sau-ling Wong’s theoretical engagement with “myths of mobility,” it specifically uses the nexus of mourning, performance, and racialization to rearticulate modes of cultural passing by constructing a lineage through several men: screen st…
Performing the Angel Island Centennial: Chinese Migration, Insular Intimacy and Fugitive Temporality
This article investigates the centenary celebrations of the Angel Island immigration station (off the coast of California) in order to think through how this site configures the island in relation to issues of Chinese migration, time and tourism. Moving through four interrelated performance events – a dance-theatre piece, the tour of the station, theatrical re-enactments of detainee interviews and the exhibition of a junk – the author identifies …
Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel Pioneer Per…
Book Review| June 01 2014 Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles against Subjection. By Ehlers, Nadine. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. 2012. x, 185 pp. Cloth, $70.00; paper, $25.00.American Po…
Isaac Julien's Ten Thousand Waves: Screening human traffic and the logic of ebbing
Perhaps, as Michaeline Crichlow suggests, art might be the best vehicle to apprehend the process of human traffic since it can capture the rich dimensionality of this phenomenon. 1 Whereas journalistic coverage might emphasize economic determinism and the inequities of human rights in terms of both definition and distribution, art foregrounds issues like representation and the conditions that enable intelligibility. How do media forms shift not o…
La Cabine d’Essayage (The Fitting Room): Cheryl Sim
Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism
Book Review| June 01 2015 Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. By Cruz, Denise. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2012. xii, 296 pp. Cloth, $89.95; paper, $24.95.Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. By Duong, Lan P.. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press. 2009. ix, 264 p…
An Inseparable Couple
Book Review| January 01 2015 An Inseparable Couple Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias. Lim, Eng-Beng. New York: New York University Press, 2014. xxii + 233 pp. Sean Metzger Sean Metzger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2015) 21 (1): 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2818576 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon …
Ocean Crafts and Chinese Junk: Keywords for Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas
Seismic Shifts: Leading Change in the American Theater
Imaging and Imagining the Chinese Caribbean: Jeanette Kong, Maria Lau, and Laura Fong Prosper
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the PacificTranspacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural NetworkInvisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature
This trio of books pulls together several strands of intellectual inquiry across academic disciplines. As a set, they nevertheless converge in their elaboration of what might be called a history of transpacific or a prehistory of Asian American literature, not so much in terms of opening an archive but instead in questioning the value and boundaries of canonical inclusion. In this regard, each work implicitly or explicitly asks how Asian American…
Sociology (27 works) · Art (25 works) · History (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (17 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · History (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works)