Racial Care: A Book Talk With James McMaster

Join the Department of Performance Studies as we welcome PS Alum James McMaster (Ph.D. '19) for special event celebrating his first book, Racial Care: On Asian American Suffering and Survival (Duke University Press, 2025).

In James McMaster's recently published monograph the category of "racial care" refers to "everything we do to sustain racialized subjects through whatever suffering may converge on their particular location within the white supremacist, anti-Black, and settler colonial capitalist order of the United States." This book talk will examine forms of racial care both as performance and in performance in order to shed light on how Asian Americans have endured contemporary life in the United States.

BIO:

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. His current book-in-progress, After 2020, Nonperformance Studies, studies how the tragic losses, broken promises, and missed opportunities that followed the COVID-19 pandemic have come to shape American society. He is also working on a book titled, Jaw Theory, a personal and political reckoning with temporomandibular disorder, a disabling condition that affects roughly 10 million people in the United States.
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.” Before joining the GWU faculty, Dr. McMaster was Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2019 to 2023. The other institutions at which he has taught include Muhlenberg College, the University of Texas at Austin, and New York University, where he earned his PhD in Performance Studies in 2019.
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.

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