Please join Professor Esther Kim Lee’s lecture on her award-winning book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022). Her book offers an extensive examination of the practice of yellowface as a historical way through which non-Asian performers portrayed Asian characters in theater, film, and media.
Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era (University of Michigan Press, 2022) explores the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862–1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Esther Kim Lee is Chair of Theater Studies and the Frances Hill Fox Professor of Theater Studies, International Comparatives Studies, and History at Duke. She specializes in theatre history and dramatic criticism. She teaches and writes about Asian American theatre, Korean diaspora theatre, interculturalism, and globalization and theatre. She is the author of A History of Asian American Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which received the 2007 Award for Outstanding Book given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and The Theatre of David Henry Hwang (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2015). She is the editor of Seven Contemporary Plays from the Korean Diaspora in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2012). Her latest book, Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era was published in 2022 and received numerous awards, including the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research and the John W. Frick Award. She also published with Bloomsbury a four-volume collection, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources, which challenges the prevailing Eurocentric reading of modern drama. In 2023, she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research.
SPONSPORED BY: Hightower Fund, Asian American & Asian Disaspora Studies (AAADS) Initiative at Emory, & Department of Theater & Dance
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