Performing Racial Exception: Race, Nation, and Modern Sovereignty , studies the relationship between the everyday and aesthetic performances of racial exception to the exercise of state power within the modern U.S. state. Racial exception is understood as the experience of occupying a racialized subject position that is simultaneously interior and exterior to national, juridical, economic, and social structures of belonging. This dissertation studies the overlapping relations of racialization, performance, power, and the nation to consider how ethnic subjects are compelled to perform in a fashion legible to dominant power arrangements in the contemporary U.S. It argues that racialized subjects are marked as the exterior limit against which ideal national subjects are formed. As a result of their simultaneously interior and exterior position with regards to sovereign exercise, racially exceptional performances can at once reproduce the conditions of power that mark the racialized body while carrying the potential to imagine alternative forms of social being that would undo the conditions of exception. The primary sites studied include Naomi Wallace's play In the Heart of America, the Ronald Reagan Funeral ritual, Suzan-Lori Parks' play The America Play and Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson's opera The Mother of Us All, the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee resistance organization in the Heart Mountain Concentration Camp for Japanese Americans during World War 2, the Moriyuki Shimada scrapbook, the purchase contracts of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the performance work of band Dengue Fever, and Ping Chong's performance piece Chinoiserie.
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