Teaching Asian American Drama in a Korean Context: Text and Crucial Issues

Teaching Asian American Drama in a Korean Context: Text and Crucial Issues

This article explores some of the pedagogic issues surrounding the field of Asian American drama in a Korean context. The first section of the article discusses difficulties of teaching the genre of drama and the area of Asian American literature. Unlike poetry and novels, the genre of drama must be taught in connection with the kind of theatre it is written for; thus, teachers of drama should be able to clarify for students the difference between theory and practice, a multitude of theatrical conventions, and readers' and audiences' potentially different receptions of a single text. Secondly, one must know the history of Asian immigration in the United States of America and Asian American literature in general in order to understand communal issues and the social context of Asian American history. The second section of the article briefly discusses obstacles, including the course itself in an undergraduate level curriculum, because of the traditional method of the genre/time-oriented rather than topic-oriented classification of English literature. Whether one can afford to spend an entire semester discussing Asian American drama or only several weeks on the subject, there are several texts to be considered and crucial issues to be discussed in class. The latter half of the article examines more than six different anthologies of Asian American drama published between 1990 to the present, the pros and cons of each collection, and how some of the plays need particular attention as potentially useful texts for Korean students. Issues of representation and authenticity have been the subject of controversy in Asian American literature in general and they could be a good starting point for heated discussion in a Korean classroom. Unfortunately, Korean American writers, particularly Korean American women, have been relatively inactive in the field of playwriting, despite the fact that theater practice is the most powerful means for constructing or subverting cultural meaning. Perhaps that issue could be one of the topics for discussion in class.