Na, Eunha2016-09-192016-09-192016-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/182166University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2016. Major: English. Advisor: Josephine Lee. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 178 pages.“Empathic Imagination: Performing Interracial Intimacy in Contemporary Women’s Theatre” interrogates the centrality of emotion in the representation of race and gender relations, focusing on contemporary drama. It investigates American women’s theatre from the 1980s to the present as key sites by which to examine empathy, a social feeling often seen as a necessary basis for liberal multicultural communities. Through examination of works by writers including Velina Hasu Houston, Suzan-Lori Parks, Diana Son, and Lynn Nottage, the dissertation argues that these plays reveal the fractured and illusory nature of an empathic community, where the desire for interracial affinities is intertwined with failures and anxieties that these plays make palpable through various performance strategies.enaffectcommunityempathyfeminismmelodramatransnationalThesis or Dissertation