Chapter 10 - On the Genealogy of Asian American Drama

Summary

This chapter investigates four representative plays from a quartet of writers that serve as precursors to the instantiation of Asian American theater: Bret Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Sadakichi Hartmann’s Osadda’s Revenge (c. 1890), Yone Noguchi’s published kyogen in English (1907), and Hong Shen’s The Wedded Husband (1921). These works reveal evidence of various textual migrations that provide different contexts in formal and thematic terms for the historiography of Asian American theater, in particular, and Asian American literature more generally. The Asian immigrant writers covered in the chapter suggest that the genre often thought to inaugurate an Asian American literary tradition – that is, life writing — overlaps with and is preceded by drama. This genealogy indicates that considerations of theatrical form might supersede the representation of immigrant experience.