An Analysis of the Identity Issue in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow face from the Perspective of Space Theory开题报告

David Henry Hwang is the most active Asian American playwright in current Hollywood and Broadway stage. TIME magazine praised him as 'the first important dramatist of American public life since Arthur Miller.” As a prominent representative of Asian-American literature, David Henry Hwang is deeply concerned about the plight of other races’ living in the United States, and takes the cultural collision and identity issues they encounter in the process of integrating into the mainstream American society of as his eternal concern.

Yellow Face is David Henry Hwang''s self-mocking drama about his reaction to the casting of Caucasian actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character in the Cameron Mackintosh–produced West End musical Miss Saigon. The main character is named after him and based on him. There are some things in it that are true and there are some things in it that aren’t true. As the play begins, Hwang draws from his own public experience as an advocate for Asian American artists, recounting his frustrating role as a leading voice against the initially controversial Broadway staging of the musical. Functioning as a kind of autobiographical and meta-theatrical satire on the Asian American experience, Yellow Face reworks the events into a farcical comedy.

Yellow Face is another reflection of Hwang''s opinion of race identity. In this kind of unreliable memoir—what he described, Hwang has a discussion about some of these issues with a little more distance and irony.

In this wickedly funny play by David Henry Hwang, Hwang puts himself (played by Kevin Shen) at the centre of the story. Hwang places an ironically distanced version of himself in the play as a narrator figure. Guardian newspaper critic Michael Billing ton writes: 'Hwang uses the satirical format to ask what it means to be classified by ethnicity, and also to invoke the xenophobic persecution of Chinese-Americans in the late 1990s. Behind the laughter, this is a probingly political play that tests the validity of Hwang''s optimistic assertion that it doesn''t matter what someone looks like on the outside.

Though the play deals mainly with the world of US theatre, the issues it tackles are directly related to the debate about identity all over the world. By analyzing the different views of the people during different period in the play, the paper aims to expose the realistic problem related to the identity, identity, shedding a new light on Hwang’s works．

The essay focuses on the view of race identity reflected in the play. The essay outlines three main stages of Chinese-Americans’ process of identity quest：the confrontation and identity crisis，the subversion of stereotypes and the transcendence of simple concepts of cultural identity. The essay is divided into five parts. Chapter one is mainly about the introduction of David Henry Hwang and some related literature review and current studies on Yellow Face. The next three chapters outlines three main stages of Chinese-Americans’ process of identity quest. To be specific, chapter two tells us the confrontation and identity crisis, including a brief depiction of the stereotype of Non-Asian and the understanding of protagonists for identity. Chapter three is related to the subversion of identity involving identity confusion and changes in identity view in Yellow Face. Chapter four is the major part of the essay. It analyzes the transcendence of cultural identity. It consists of two parts, which mainly show the fluidity of identity during Chinese-Americans’ process of identity quest, in which individuality and commonness are deemed to be respected and advocated. Chapter five makes a summary of the essay and the expectation of identity study.

David Henry Hwang is a outstanding playwright with a lot of extraordinary works and achievements. He focus on describing the life of ethnic minorities and the differences between the East and West. Since David Henry Hwang is popular in 1980s, researches about his plays have increased. Scholars, both home and abroad, study his works from deconstructivism, cultural study, post-colonialism, and so on.

Because his excellent work M. Butterfly, which has something similar with Yellow Face, many papers talk about the subversion and deconstruction of this work. Such as Robert Skloot’s Breaking the Butterfly: the Politics of David Henry Hwang. In China, many scholars also did a lot of researches on these themes. For example, Xv Haixia from Nanjing Normal University analyzes the deconstruction of orientalism and its inadequacy in this work. What’s more, there are also some researchers study Hwang’s plays from the perspective of the thesis—cultural conflicts and cultural identity. An American writer Dorinne K. Kondo writes a paper, M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity. Meanwhile, Andrew Shin shows his review in Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang''s 'M. Butterfly' and 'Golden Gate'. As for the current researching trends at home,the research is mainly based on Hwang’s plays as well, for example, Jiang junjun’s From Cultural Conflicts to Cultural Transcendence:A Cultural Study on Golden Child by David Henry Hwang and Li Xiaoyi’s David Henry Huang: the exploration and innovation of culture identity. And some papers pay attention to the comprehensive study of Hwang’s works, including Song Yanli’s “A review of research on hwang''s comedy in China and Performing American Identity: The Plays of David Henry Hwang by Martha Johnsonee. While when it comes to the study of Yellow Face, the related documents are few. In China, He Yiping and Kong Jingfang concludes Chinese-Americans’ identity issue in the play in their paper respectively. At the same time, there are other people who analyze the novel from the perspective of identity but from different aspects. For instance, Zhang Qiu Mei studies the rupture of identity and ethnic performativity in her paper The Performativity of Asian Americans: A New Interpretation of David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face.

From the analysis above, it is clear to see that identity is a vital issue in DavidHenry Hwang’s plays which has been in related studies. And Hwang’s works during different periods present something new, Yellow Face is no exception. However, the researches or studies about the identity issue in it is comparatively few.

Besides, identity is a hotly discussed issue all over the world. Scholars both at home and abroad have good comments on it. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz from UNRWA University said that Marginalized American playwrights use a precautious and defensive rhetoric to protect their ethnic communities from being erased by a dominant mainstream center.

Outline

1. Introduction

1.1 About David Henry Hwang and his theme of plays

1.2 About Yellow Face

1.3 Research objectives and significance

1.4 Thesis structure

2. The confrontation and identity crisis

2.1 The stereotype of Non-Asian

2.2 The understanding of identity

3. The subversion of identity

3.1 Identity confusion

3.2 Changes in Identity view

4. The transcendence of cultural identity

4.1 The fluidity of Identity

4.2 Individuality and commonness

5. Conclusion

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