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, a 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.

Kondo will discuss the theoretical/political stakes of the book and its discursive chapters, followed by reading, with Royal Central School of Speech and Drama faculty and students, of several scenes from Seamless.

“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

Scholar, playwright and dramaturg Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California.