Performance of Asianness in Early 20th Century Melodrama is the title of the dissertation of Misa Oyama, a graduate student in the Department of English. With a focus on popular representations of Asians in American fiction and film, Oyama’s dissertation considers the role of the conventions of melodrama and “yellow face”–melodrama is the most popular mode for representing Asians in the United States–in the construction of Asian racial identity. If audiences of melodrama learn to read the actors’ bodies as “pure expressions of their moral states,” Oyama asks, what happens when questions surrounding the body involve racial legibility as well?