The Last Bookstore, 453 S. Spring St. in Los Angeles, is pleased to present Dorinne Kondo and friends sharing excerpts from her new book, “Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity,” on Thursday, Aug. 22, at 7:30 p.m.
The event will include live performances of selected scenes from “Seamless,” her full-length play about the emotional afterlife of Japanese American incarceration, which is contained in full within “Worldmaking.”
Grounded in critical ethnographic work, “Worldmaking” theorizes racialized labor, aesthetics, affect, genre, and structural inequality in contemporary theater. The text upends genre, interleaving analysis with vignettes and Kondo’s play.
The book journeys from an initial romance with theater that is shattered by encounters with racism, toward reparative creativity in the work of minoritarian artists Anna Deavere Smith, David Henry Hwang, and Kondo’s own.
“Worldmaking” theorizes and performs the ways the arts can remake worlds, from theater worlds to inner, psychic worlds to worldmaking visions for social transformation.
The cost is $27.95, which includes a copy of the book.
Kondo is professor of American studies and anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her books include the award-winning “Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace” (J.I. Staley Prize from the School for Advanced Research, for a book that has influenced the field of anthropology), and “About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater” (Cultural and Literary Studies Prize, Association for Asian American Studies).
Kondo served as dramaturg for three plays by Smith, including “Twilight: Los Angeles,” about the 1992 uprisings.
For reservations, click here.