front cover of From Inner Worlds to Outer Space
From Inner Worlds to Outer Space
The Multimedia Performances of Dan Kwong
Dan Kwong
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Praise for Dan Kwong:

"Somehow, Kwong has held onto his sense of childlike wonder about the cosmos, and that awe informs his free-wheeling and uproarious performance."
-Asian Week

"He weaves striking, multi-focus stage pictures around simple monologues about his Chinese and Japanese grandfathers, ironic accounts of his own childhood, and litanies of the trials facing Asian American males."
-L.A. Times

"Saturated with high-spirited enthusiasm . . . a refreshingly forthright approach to his often dark material."
-Chicago Tribune

"Kwong's humor is warm and loving . . . it stems from a delightfully twisted taste for the absurdity of human behavior. . . . Be prepared to laugh, to be moved, and to fall in love with a performer."
-L.A. Reader

Dan Kwong's performances delve into the complexities of growing up as a working-class Chinese-Japanese-American male in L.A., land of Hollywood and Disney. Kwong's remarkable performances, a potent array of multimedia effects and athletic physicalization, investigate questions of identity and the intersecting effects of race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality. From Inner Worlds to Outer Space brings together Kwong's scripts with illuminating commentary by critic Robert Vorlicky. The book includes interviews that reveal Kwong's personal and artistic influences, his evolution as an artist, and his philosophical and technical approach to art-making.

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Transplanetary Americas
Art, Outer Space, and the Latinx Imagination
Robb Hernández
Duke University Press, 2026
In Transplanetary Americas, Robb Hernández launches a propulsive pathway for Latinx cultural studies by exploring how the modern space race has driven artists to look up and attune to expressions derived from the solar system and beyond. By advancing a theoretical and methodological framework he calls “transplanetary relationality,” Hernández shows how artists’ ascendant attentions unhinge Latinidades from their terrestrial bindings in an aerial pursuit of being with this and other planets. Speculation, science, and technology fuel creative activities about the cosmos, taking Latinx art history into unexpected territory. Science fiction B-movie aesthetics empower political statements of the third kind. NASA’s Apollo program sparks muralist imaginations about other planetary vistas. Private aerospace companies are prompting new generations of artist-activists to defend not only land but sky. By showcasing visionaries who frustrate categories of time and place, Hernández’s investigation transcends the typical limits of border studies with a vertical scale, proving that the color of space is not only black but brown as well.
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