Duke’s annual fall symposium returned this September with the theme, "Asian American Art and Performance." It featured a film screening of About Face: Disrupting Ballet, exploring how Asian American performers shape the art world. Photo credit: Chelsea Nguyen
2026 AADS Fall Symposium Brings Guest Speakers, Dance Film to Duke
On September 19, 2026, Duke’s Asian American and Diaspora Studies (AADS) Program hosted its annual fall symposium with the theme “Asian American Art and Performance.” The symposium featured a series of talks and discussions, along with a film screening of About Face: Disrupting Ballet, to explore how Asian American artists and performers shape the art world.
Sean Metzger, Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty and Students at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, opened the symposium with a talk on his upcoming book, Ambivalent States: Staging Asylees and Refugees from the Asian Diaspora. Through specific cases, the book examines how xenophobia and racism are performed through the law and can be identified and challenged through art, film, and theater. Every chapter presents a special case of asylees and refugees in relation to films and performances–such as the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII, US immigration after the American wars in Southeast Asia, asylees driven by persecution of sexuality during the 1990s, and climate refugees–and analyzes how art and performance expose what the law can’t see and challenge existing legal frameworks. Ultimately, through Ambivalent States, Metzger argues that refugee status is produced by law, and law is a kind of performance. The closing call is to move from “calling out the perils of identification to figuring out how we relate to and care for one another in an increasingly authoritarian climate.”
Ju Yon Kim, Patsy Takemoto Mink Professor of English at Harvard, followed with a talk titled “Registration Dramas: Paper Performances and Japanese American Incarceration.” In her talk, Kim asked how bureaucracy is also a performance–one that sheds light on how subjects experience the quotidian.
Through a close reading of Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13360, she demonstrated how both bureaucratic papers during World War II and Japanese Americans’ response to them were performative acts with material consequences. Through understanding injustices like Japanese American internment as a processual and paper performance, Kim argued, we can better understand its intention, affect, and effects.
The symposium concluded with a screening of About Face: Disrupting Ballet, a documentary directed by Jennifer Lin highlighting two Asian American ballet dancers in New York City advocating for companies to remove and reimagine long-standing Asian stereotypes and caricatures from classic ballets — particularly The Nutcracker and La Bayadère. These activists’ experiences as Asian American dancers deeply informed their work and collaboration on “Final Bow for Yellowface,” a pledge adopted by nearly every major American ballet company to eliminate yellowface depictions and racist stereotypes from stage performance.
Following the screening, Jingqiu Guan, Associate Professor of the Practice of Dance at Duke, led an audience discussion with Lin. Lin described the film’s genesis as rooted in the milieu of racial reckoning raised by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate in the summer of 2020. Lin also noted broader trends within American dance to imagine and create art to better represent the complexity and fullness of its dancers.
Please see this library resource prepared in conjunction with the symposium by Dr. Matthew Hayes and Dr. Adhitya Dhanapal.
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