ABOUT AFONG’S ROOM

Our vision for Afong's Room grew out of collaborations among faculty, administrators, artists and students through lead support of the UMass Fine Arts Center Asian and Asian American Arts and Cultures Program (AAAACP) in collaboration with other UMass Amherst programs, including the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, Office for Equity and Inclusion, and Asian/Asian American Certificate Program, as well as the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program. 

This journal emerges in a moment of renewed urgency for us to turn to the stage, not just as an artistic space, but as a site for radical possibilities, truth, memory, and collective liberation. We were inspired to highlight and engage with the dynamic programming of the AAAACP by showcasing some of the 2024-2025 season’s artists, whose practices are dis/orienting the stage. Through this journal, we engage deeply with the artists on stage whose creative acts are their weapons for resistance and hope to spark conversation, expanding the reach of such radical acts. 

From the earliest "performances" of Afong Moy embodying the Chinese Lady to Asian/American artists taking space on and off stage, Asian and Asian American performance has always been a site of resistance, with the active need to disorient and challenge the colonial gaze, imperial violence, war, migration, and systemic erasure in systems that default to exoticizing and manipulating them. This journal hopes to honor that enduring legacy by centering the radical, complex, and multifaceted ways Asian and Asian American artists have long used performance, not only as a vehicle to directly disidentify with orientalist depictions, but also to disrupt systemic injustice.