Asian American Hollywood: Race, Gender, and Cinematic Representations

Chen, Yu Min Claire; Chen, Yu Min Claire

The past two years have been significant for Asian American Hollywood. First, and most visible, is the recent awards sweep by the Asian American film Everything Everywhere All At Once that brought Asian/American representation and starpower in Hollywood into heightened public awareness. A more quiet celebration of Asian American Hollywood was the recognition of Anna May Wong as the “first” Asian American actress in 2022, whose image is now enshrined on the US quarter. While these are significant recognition of Asian American presence and absence in dominant historiography of Hollywood,the positioning of both these events and the figures/text referenced as “firsts” or “breakthroughs” reify a flattened presentist temporality and neoliberal multiculturalist narratives that enables forgettings and elisions of how the economic structure and narrative and visual content of Hollywood itself has always been intertwined with Asian/American bodies and forms. Through a multivalent analysis - of genre, icon status, visual economy, and financial capitalism - this panel seeks to historicize the complex racial and gendered relationship between Hollywood cinema with Asian American racialization, US imperialism in Asia, and the movement of capital since the earliest moments of US filmmaking. Since the 1920s, Hollywood has dominated the international cinema industry. As opposed to a new and emergent presence, this panel instead poses Asian bodies and representations as constitutive to the development and imaginative possibilities of Hollywood itself.

In her paper, “It’s All About Family--Chinese Americans in Contemporary American Films,” Wing Shan Ho offers a broad survey of such transpacific relations through a comparative analysis of Chinese and Chinese American films, and identifies a theme of intergenerational discord as a throughline throughout disparate texts such as Crazy Rich Asians (2018), The Farewell (2019), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Our second presenter, Brenda Wang, in their paper, “Anna May Wong and the Buddha: Close-up as Racial Interpretation in The Thief of Baghdad (1924)" deepens our understanding of the Golden Age of Hollywood and the industry’s emerging fascination with close-ups of the “Asiatic” face, through an analysis of the 1920’s oeuvre films of Anna May Wong. Filmic portrayals of Wong reveal a visual fascination with inscrutability, flatness, and unreadability, a fascination that morphs into different forms throughout Hollywood history. Our third presenter Lynn Mie Itagaki in "Asians Arriving in Hollywood's American Dream: Representing Settler Lives and Racial Capitalism" considers the contemporary filmic expressions of Hollywood’s American Dream as a centuries-long imperialism produced by financial capitalism, the Great Recession from 2007-2009 and the current pandemic economy. Two celebrated and prominent award-winning films in 2020—Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland—retrace a White settler fantasy since the Golden Age of Hollywood, but this time Asian/Americans are claiming America and being celebrated for it—in front of and behind the camera. If Itagaki’s paper offers a broader perspective on the formative relationship between capital, settler colonialism, and Hollywood fantasies, our fourth and concluding paper by Leland Tabares focuses on a specific genre, “the campus film.” “Imperfect Students: On Asian American Imperfection & the Campus Film,” traces shifting representations of Asian American student figures in contemporary campus films in order to identify an emergent cultural figure of the Asian American "weirdo." The term reimagines Asian American social subjecthood while challenging Asian Americans' disciplinary relation to other communities of color in the twenty-first century as Asian Americans aspire to new modes of profession. Overall, these papers seek to historicize Hollywood’s current fascination of Asian American bodies and modes of storytelling, revealing a complex history of Asian disavowal, fetishization, and resistance at the core of American Hollywood.

517 Asian American Hollywood: Race, Gender, and Cinematic Representations: Calls for Papers