About Face

From the catwalks of Paris to the Broadway stage, from Rising Sun to the casting controversies over Miss Saigon , from high fashion advertising to a local demonstration at the Claremont Colleges in California, About Face examines representations of Asia and their reverberations in both Asia and Asian American lives. Japanese high fashion and Asian American theatre become points of entry into the politics of pleasure, the performance of racial identities, and the possibility of political intervention in commodity capitalism. Based on Kondo's fieldwork, this genre-bending text brings together essays, interviews with designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons and playwright David Henry Hwang, and 'personal' vignettes in its exploration of counter-Orientalisms' attempts to subvert the dominant.