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"Intersectionalities: Race, Righting, and Representation in Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight"
Lynn Itagaki, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, UCLA
November 11, 2003

Challenging mainstream constructions of race as criminal and a Korean-Black conflict in the Los Angeles Uprising in 1992, Anna Deavere Smith encourages her audience to see the contingency of interracial perspectives and identities through juxtaposing fifty monologues in the text of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Smith's artistic process of interviewing, editing and performing the words of participants and spectators of the Los Angeles Uprising exposes the strengths and weaknesses of Critical Race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw's notion of "intersectionality": categories of identity dispersed through shifting axes that recognize race, gender, class and sexuality. This foundational concept in Critical Race Studies responds to the failure of racial identity formations to encompass other axes of oppression such as gender, class and even intraracial distinctions. In reviews of Twilight, critics applaud Smith's "democratic" theatre, that her dramatic structure comprised of a succession of twenty or more monologues exemplifies pluralism and a common humanity beyond racial classifications. However, I argue that this purported "colorblindness" is far from the ethical value of Smith's performance and stagecraft in Twilight's fundamental dissonance and the intersectional process of identity formation the audience must undergo to connect the different monologues and visual elements.