I Will Make of My Scaffold, a Stage

Performing the Asian American Subject in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

Bibliographic Data

ID11272794
AuthorsS H T Lee, Suan Lee (0000-0002-3047-1167, Gustavus Adolphus College, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume38
Issue3
Pages126-145
Publication date2013-09-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/melus/mlt034
OpenAlexW2053903746
LanguageEN
References cited20

A short poem in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey by the writer-protagonist Wittman depicts a poet who is also a window-washer falling off of his scaffold, barely escaping death, and declaring, “I will make of my scaffold, a stage” (30). This double metaphor of the scaffold and the stage offers a provocative starting point for the article's exploration of the related issues of writing and performing Asian American authorship and subjectivity in Tripmaster Monkey. The scaffold/stage functions as a site of Asian American subject formation where the dominant culture constructs a reductive identity of the Asian American, while the subject writes and performs him- or herself differently. The novel reveals subjects as formed through a dialectic of the scaffold and the stage—cultural inscription and self-fashioning—that resists permanence and reification. The article sheds light on the neglected area of performance in the novel, arguing that the theatrical context enables Kingston to envision revisionary identity construction more radically than she can through the writing context alone. By distinguishing three main types of racial performance in the novel—mandated cultural performance, differential revisionary performance, and constitutive new performance—and delving into such stage traditions as vaudeville and solo theatre, the article highlights Kingston's emphasis on key elements of resistance. Both concrete and ephemeral, performance makes possible a reconstituted Asian American subjectivity that is nonetheless fluid and transformative.

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology) · Ephemeral key · Epistemology · Identity (music) · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Subject (documents) · Subjectivity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Computer Science · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Music History and Culture · Philosophy

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