Choreographing Asian America

"(Y)ou will learn a different process to making art from Yutian Wong's book. I strongly recommend it."—Bernadine Jennings, Attitude: The Dancers' Magazine

"Choreographing Asian America takes us on an engrossing journey through Asian American dance and politics. Wong makes clear that dance has been woefully neglected in the growing scholarship in Asian American cultural criticism. Moving from the history of the 'Oriental dancing girl' to an extended analysis of Vietnamese American performance collective Club O'Noodles to the overbearing popularity of Miss Saigon, she lays out the challenges of writing about dance and performance in corporeal and kinetic terms. At times personal, philosophical, irreverent, and somber, Wong engages the most basic questions of Asian American bodies, movements, representation, desire, and dance."—Josephine Lee, author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage

"Choreographing Asian America takes us on an engrossing journey through Asian American dance and politics. Wong makes clear that dance has been woefully neglected in the growing scholarship in Asian American cultural criticism. Moving from the history of the 'Oriental dancing girl' to an extended analysis of Vietnamese American performance collective Club O'Noodles to the overbearing popularity of Miss Saigon, she lays out the challenges of writing about dance and performance in corporeal and kinetic terms. At times personal, philosophical, irreverent, and somber, Wong engages the most basic questions of Asian American bodies, movements, representation, desire, and dance."—Josephine Lee, author of Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage

"Choreographing Asian America deftly brings Asian American race/ethnicity studies and contemporary U.S. dance studies together and inaugurates a new (but long-overdue) field of Asian American dance studies. Wong's nuanced ethnographic approach to the work of Club O' Noodles gives us a richer understanding of Asian American performance's aesthetic and political possibilities."—Karen Shimakawa, Performance Studies, NYU