Performing Race: Heterotopias in David Henry Hwang's FOB and Bondage

This essay offers an alternative to the dominant thematic reading of David Henry Hwang's employment of racial stereotypes in FOB and Bondage, arguing that his creation of one imagined performance space laid on top of another within a single theater venue disrupts linear racial discourses by inducing the audience to inhabit multi- layered spaces simultaneously. It uncovers how physical settings, including the theater, the back room of a Chinese restaurant, the S&M parlor, and performance spaces, work together to set up a color-blind communitas where the logic of inclusion/exclusion is disrupted and an alternate vision of subject formation is embraced.