The School of English cordially invites you to attend the following seminar offered by Dr. Amy Huang:

Affecting Asianness and the Art of Restraint on American Stages

Dr. Amy Huang, Bates College

June 6, 2024, Thursday, 4:30 p.m.

Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the performance of Asian stoicism and inscrutability on American stages engaged with questions about immigration and abjection while expanding the theatre’s capacities for expressing and constraining feelings. This talk traces how the representations of Asian reserve and restraint in Chester Bailey Fernald’s The Cat and the Cherub (1897) and David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad (1981) worked to shape an intimate spectatorship attuned to psychic depth through the performance of emotional restraint.

Amy B. Huang is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Bates College. Her book project, Circuits of Secrets on British and American Stages, focuses on how theatre’s secrecy engages with the power relations and racist imaginaries attached to slavery, settler colonialism, Orientalism, and Chinese exclusion. Her recent research focuses on early Asian American and diasporic theatre artists’ conceptions of temporality and history. Her work has appeared in Theatre Survey, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Milestones in Asian American Theatre. Her research has been inspired and supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Harrison Institute at the University of Virginia, the Newberry Library, and Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.