RoutledgeCurzon - IIAS Asian Studies Series

Diasporas and Interculturalism in Asian Performing Arts: Translating Traditions

Hae-kyung Um

In an age of globalization, performance is increasingly drawn from intercultural creativity and located in mulicultural settings. This volume is the first to focus on the performing arts of Asian diasporas in the context of modernity and multiculturalism. The chapters locate the contemporary performing arts as a discursive field in which the boundaries between tradition and translation, and authenticity and hybridity are redefined and negotiated to create a multitude of meanings and aesthetics in global and local context.

A wide range of traditional and contemporary performing arts, including theatre, dance and music, and their practice across the globe are investigated in relation to:

  • the location of the performing arts in late modernity;
  • intercultural and transnational processes, agencies and forms;
  • identity, ethnicity, notions of displacement, gender, interethnic power relations, intercultural negotiations;
  • the social and political implications of performance;
  • production and consumption of intercultural performances.

With contributions from scholars of Asian studies, theatre studies, anthropology, cultural studies, dance ethnology and musicology, this truly interdisciplinary work covers every aspect of the sociology of performance of the Asian diasporas.