Join the American Theatre & Drama Society for an online conversation with the authors of new books at the intersections of Queer of Color Critique and Theatre and Performance Studies:

·      Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America by Chris A. Eng

·      Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival by James McMaster

·      Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture

by Isaiah Matthew Wooden

After our panelists engage with some prepared discussion questions, we will open the session for Q&A with attendees.

Register for the roundtable. Registrants will receive the Zoom link shortly before the event.

If you’re not already a member of the American Theatre & Drama Society, please join. We continue to offer pay-what-you-can membership. Membership and donations help us to fund programming like this roundtable as part of our ongoing anti-racist initiatives.

Author Bios:

Chris A. Eng is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Primarily situated at the intersections of Asian American cultural studies and queer of color critique, his research and teaching engage the fields of critical ethnic studies, performance studies, and post45 literatures alongside theorizations of affect, diaspora, and empire. His first book, Extravagant Camp: The Queer Abjection of Asian America (NYU Press, 2025), illuminates Asian American camp as a prevalent yet underappreciated cultural strategy for contesting accounts of racialization that overly rely on terms of abjection. The book follows campy performances that imaginatively restage the camps that have been central to dominant narratives of Asian American history: Chinese railroad labor, Japanese American incarceration, Vietnam War refugee resettlement, and counterinsurgency camps across US imperial entanglements in the Philippines. Theorizing Asian American camp as both a performance strategy and reading practice, Eng examines how artists drag up the maligned racial roles of the coolie, the internee, the refugee, and the diva to make different sense of these histories. Extravagant Camp shows how Asian American camp takes on queerness as a resource to enliven modes of joy, beauty, and pleasure within structures of constraint, revealing the types of power camp retrieves for racialized communities in the face of abjection. This monograph was a recipient of the CLAGS Fellowship Award and a finalist for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Outstanding Book Award.

James McMaster is an interdisciplinary scholar who analyzes twenty-first century American cultural production and social movements for what each can teach us about how minoritarian subjects have experienced moments of prolonged crisis in the United States His first book, Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival (Duke University Press, 2025), examines the forms of care that Asian Americans have performed to survive their experiences of racism in the United States throughout the Obama-Trump years. As Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at the George Washington University, his classes span a diverse range of topics, with titles like “Introduction to Asian American Studies,” “The Politics of Care,” and “Minoritarian Performance Studies.” His critical writing and cultural criticism have been published in numerous venues including the Journal of Asian American Studies, American Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Howlround, VICE, Teen Vogue, and a number of edited volumes. He serves on the advisory board for Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory (2019-present). He is also a previous political chair of GAPIMY: Empowering Queer and Trans Asian Pacific Islanders (2017-2019). As a speaker, consultant, and content expert on matters pertaining to the LGBTQ+ and Asian American communities, Dr. McMaster has worked with numerous professional, community, and student organizations. As a public intellectual, he has shared his knowledge internationally on television, stages, and podcasts.

Isaiah Matthew Wooden is a scholar-artist who researches and writes about contemporary drama, performance, and visual culture. Wooden is the author of Reclaiming Time: Race, Temporality, and Black Expressive Culture (Northwestern UP, 2025), which was a finalist for the 2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Outstanding Book Award. He is also the co-editor of several volumes including August Wilson in Context (Cambridge UP, 2025), Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern UP, 2020), and “Manifestos for Black Theatre, Then and Now,” a special section of Theatre History Studies (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2024). Wooden has contributed more than sixty articles, essays, and reviews on contemporary art, drama, and performance to scholarly and popular publications. His research has been awarded myriad fellowships and honors from within and beyond Theatre and Performance Studies. As a director and dramaturg, Wooden has collaborated on projects in venues ranging from the Uganda National Theatre to the Kennedy Center, including works by Lee Breuer, Kia Corthron, Eisa Davis, Lorraine Hansberry, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Charles L. Mee, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, Natsu Onoda Power, Nilaja Sun, Lisa B. Thompson, and Mary Zimmerman. He has served on the Governing Council for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; Executive Boards for the American Theatre and Drama Society, the August Wilson Society, and the Black Theater Association; the Editorial Boards for Imagined Theatres, PAJ, and Theatre Topics; and as the Performance Review Editor ofTheatre Journal.