Twilight Uprising

In May 1992, Anna Deavere Smith was commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to create this one-woman performance that reflected the recent civil unrest (Smith, “Guide to Twilight” 4). According to the African American Review, “Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary theater helped earn for her a MacArthur Foundation genius award, an award that later followed on the heels of her winning an Obie Award and a Pulitzer Prize runner up in 1992 for Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (Brown-Guillory 372). Her work remains influential in American theater where “Twilight enlarges and redefines American theater experience in this unique first person portrait of the Los Angeles Riots of 1992” (Brown Guillory 372).

Certain bystanders during the uprising may not be central to the Black-Korean conflict narrative, but gathering their outside perspectives can call forth information that is not visible to the naked eye. For instance, Smith presents herself as Katie Miller, a bookkeeper and accountant who reports her account of a looting that happened during the uprising. Miller begins her monologue by saying that “the Korean stores that got burned in the Black neighborhood that were Korean-owned, it was due to lack of getting to know the people who come to [their] store” (Smith, “Twilight,” 129). Miller’s description of Korean-owned shops in black neighborhoods brings up the idea that “Conflict between immigrant Korean retail merchants and their African American customers has been documented by the media in various cities across the United States since the early 1980s” (Bailey 86). This indicates that there are some type of cultural differences that contributed to conflicts between Korean merchants and African American customers. Such interactions occur within a space where Korean merchants are setting up businesses in black neighborhoods. Major conflicts such as the Latasha Harlins case, for example, “demonstrated the differential treatment accorded to both groups by the American legal system” (Stewart 25). Events such as the Latasha Harlins sparked a lot of division between the African American community and Korean American community; this case was a result of many of the conflicts both groups had with one another and even further exacerbated these differences. The lack of equally fair treatment under the American legal system was also accompanied by stark differences in economic areas where “the median family income for African Americans, Hispanics, and Korean Americans in 1989 was $14,930, $15,531 and $20,147 respectively” (Stewart 24). While