When Your Shoes Do Not Fit Me: Conundrums of Performing Empathy in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
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This essay examines the potentials and limits of empathy in negotiating and reimagining race relations in the embodied space of theater. Revisiting Korean American representations in Anna Deavere Smith’s celebrated solo performance piece Twilight, this essay considers complex ways in which embodied practices of empathy can negotiate and reimagine interraciality. While theater provides a liminal space for disparate groups to interact and find affinities through imagination, the embodied nature of such encounters inevitably complicates the otherwise easy process of identification. Bearing in mind the phenomenological space of live theater and the embodied spectatorship, this essay argues that Smith’s affective strategy straddles the line between ethnic stereotyping and racial sympathy in making Korean victimhood legible to a mainstream audience. While Smith’s border-crossing acts performatively create a sense of community by temporarily erasing differences for the viewers, moments of such empathic failure illustrate both the enduring power of racial suffering as a potent rhetoric and its precarious and unstable nature that fails to bind disparate racial histories and cultures. Despite liminal spaces for transformation and optimism that are present in the play, the moment of possible empathic failure evinces lingering skepticism about the collective move toward post-raciality.
Abstract
This essay examines the potentials and limits of empathy in negotiating and reimagining race relations in the embodied space of theater. Revisiting Korean American representations in Anna Deavere Smith’s celebrated solo performance piece Twilight, this essay considers complex ways in which embodied practices of empathy can negotiate and reimagine interraciality. While theater provides a liminal space for disparate groups to interact and find affinities through imagination, the embodied nature of such encounters inevitably complicates the otherwise easy process of identification. Bearing in mind the phenomenological space of live theater and the embodied spectatorship, this essay argues that Smith’s affective strategy straddles the line between ethnic stereotyping and racial sympathy in making Korean victimhood legible to a mainstream audience. While Smith’s border-crossing acts performatively create a sense of community by temporarily erasing differences for the viewers, moments of such empathic failure illustrate both the enduring power of racial suffering as a potent rhetoric and its precarious and unstable nature that fails to bind disparate racial histories and cultures. Despite liminal spaces for transformation and optimism that are present in the play, the moment of possible empathic failure evinces lingering skepticism about the collective move toward post-raciality.
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