THE DRAMA OF WORLDMAKING

Grounded in critical ethnographic work, Dorinne Kondo’s Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity theorizes racialized labor, aesthetics, affect, genre, and structural inequality in contemporary theater. The text upends genre, interleaving analysis with vignettes and her full-length play Seamless, s comic drama about the afterlife of the historical trauma of Japanese American incarceration. The book theorizes and performs the ways the arts can remake worlds, from theater worlds to inner, psychic worlds to worldmaking visions for social transformation.

"Dorinne Kondo's work recalls us to the indispensable power of creative art and action during times when prospects for persistence are closing for so many. Brave, passionate, and always incisive, Kondo's work paves the way for those who seek to know the link between art and politics for our time." — Judith Butler

Dorinne Kondo is a playwright, dramaturg, cultural anthropologist, and performance studies scholar. Her books include Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and Worldmaking. She has written three full-length plays and is working on a fourth Kondo served as a dramaturg for three world premieres of theater artist Anna Deavere Smith’s plays, including Twilight: Los Angeles, about the 1992 uprisings.