Racial Performativity and Its Subversion, and Negotiation of Race: Yellow Face, Clybourne Park, and Hamilton: An American Musical = 인종 수행성, 전복, 그리고 인종을 둘러싼 협상: 『옐로우 페이스』, 『클라이본 파크』, 『해밀턴』을 중심으로

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In the so-called “post-racial” era of the twenty-first-century United States, race has not disappeared but continues to shape social experience, cultural representation, and relations of power. As a vital area for staging and contesting such issues, contemporary American theatre offers a particularly productive site for examining how racial identity is constructed and negotiated. This dissertation examines how contemporary American theatre stages race as a performative formation in the so-called post-racial era through a comparative study of three major twenty-first-century American works concerned with race—David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical.
This dissertation draws on Judith Butler’s framework of performativity and its extension into racial performativity. Her paradigm of gender performativity offers critical insights into other dimensions of identity, especially racial formation, by elucidating how the racial hierarchy is maintained and strengthened within social institutions, which advances an anti-essentialist paradigm by destabilizing traditional notions of identity. Against the traditional view of race as a stable biological essence, this dissertation argues that the three works stage race as a socially constructed formation repeatedly enacted through discourse, embodied performance, and institutional practice. Through a comparative reading of the three plays, this dissertation shows how contemporary theatre stages race as a performative formation produced through discourse, embodied performance, and institutional practice.
This dissertation adopts a close-reading methodology and employs comparative analysis. The three plays are investigated respectively to explore how they engage with issues of race and to demonstrate how racial identity is performatively enacted through repeated social acts, discourse, and institutions. Specifically, this thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One offers a general introduction of the present study, including the background, research objects, and the theoretical foundation. Chapter Two concerns the analysis of how David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face performs race and foregrounds the fluidity of ethnic identity. Chapter Three examines how Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park breaks the myth of “post-racial” era and exposes how the entrenched racial hierarchy, discrimination, and segregation persist in transformed forms in contemporary American society. Chapter Four investigates how Hamilton reconstructs American national history through color-conscious casting, hip-hop performance, and the multiracial re- embodiment of the Founding Fathers. The final chapter concludes the findings in which some implications are also discussed.
The findings show that these plays demonstrate a subversion of the conventional essentialist view of race. Crucially, these theatrical works illuminate how race operates as a performative construct through distinct but interconnected mechanisms on the contemporary American stage. In Yellow Face, Hwang exposes race as a performative and socially constructed category through his critique of yellowface, the Miss Saigon casting controversy, and Marcus Gee’s racial passing. This play shows that even in multicultural America, racial hierarchy persists through representation, discourse, and institutional power, while also highlighting the subversive potential of racial performativity and the fluidity of racial identity. Clybourne Park shifts the analysis from identity and recognition to space, language, and civic performance. Through its two-act structure, Norris dramatizes how racial hierarchy persists through property discourse, neighborhood boundaries, polite speech, jokes, and colorblind civility. This play shows that post-racial liberalism does not eliminate racial conflict, but displaces it into seemingly neutral debates over property value, community preservation, renovation, and historical memory. Hamilton: An American Musical reimagines national history through color- conscious casting and performative re-embodiment while also complicating celebratory narratives of inclusion and multiculturalism.
Through these comparative readings, the dissertation demonstrates that contemporary American theatre does more than affirm that race is socially constructed. It reveals the concrete theatrical and social mechanisms through which race becomes visible, credible, and socially consequential. Yellow Face, Clybourne Park, and Hamilton collectively show that racial performativity operates across the interrelated domains of identity, space, discourse, sound, institution, and national memory. This study therefore challenges the post-racial myth not simply by asserting that racism persists, but by showing how racial hierarchy continues to be reproduced in transformed and less visible forms. By connecting ethnic American literary studies, performance theory, and contemporary theatre criticism, this dissertation offers a comparative study of racial performativity and reaffirms the continuing importance of race in twenty-first-century American theatre. Keywords: race, racial performativity, contemporary American theatre, Yellow Face, Clybourne Park, Hamilton: An American Musical

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. Introduction 1
• II. Performing Race in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face: Yellowface, Racial Passing, and Fluidity of Asian American Identity 32
• III. Performing Race in Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park: “Racism Without Racist” . 57
• IV. Performing Race and Reimagining History in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical 87
• V. Conclusion 112
• Works Cited 123
• 요약 136