As exemplified by Madame Butterfly, East-West relations have often been expressed as the relations between the masculine, dominant West and the feminine, submissive East. Yet, this binary model does not account for the important role of white women in the construction of Orientalism. Mari Yoshihara's study examines a wide range of white women who were attracted to Japan and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and shows how, through their engagement with Asia, these women found new forms of expression, power, and freedom that were often denied to them in other realms of their lives in America. She demonstrates how white women's attraction to Asia shaped and was shaped by a complex mix of exoticism for the foreign, admiration for the refined, desire for power and control, and love and compassion for the people of Asia. Through concrete historical narratives and careful textual analysis, she examines the ideological context for America's changing discourse about Asia and interrogates the power and appeal-as well as the problems and limitations-of American Orientalism for white women's explorations of their identities. Combining the analysis of race and gender in the United States and the study of U.S.-Asian relations, Yoshihara's work represents the transnational direction of scholarship in American Studies and U.S. history. In addition, this interdisciplinary work brings together diverse materials and approaches, including cultural history, material culture, visual arts, performance studies, and literary analysis.

Embracing the East : white women and American orientalism

Dianying: Electric Shadows. An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China.

chapter 1 I: Introduction 1. Cultural Essentialism and Asian American Films chapter 2 2. Between a Weapon and a Formula chapter 3 3. Asian American Aesthetics chapter 4 II: Cinematic Asian Representation 1. Representation as Image chapter 5 2. Politics of Representation chapter 6 3. The Institution of Representation chapter 7 III. Documentaries as Social History 1. History as Subject: Personal Diary Films and Family Portraits chapter 8 2. History As Consciousness: Biographies and Communal Histories chapter 9 3. History as Representation: Social-Issue Documentaries chapter 10 IV: Hybrid Cinema by Asian American Women 1. Avant-Garde Film as History chapter 11 2. Time and Subjectivity chapter 12 3. Screen Space as Social Space chapter 13 V: Conclusion 1. A Cinema in Transition: "Cross-Over" Films chapter 14 2. Films from the Asian Diaspora chapter 15 Appendix: Theories on Ethnicity and Film chapter 16 Notes chapter 17 Bibliography chapter 18 Filmography chapter 19 Index

Asian America through the lens : history, representations, and identity

Soul Searching: Black-Themed Cinema from the March on Washington to the Rise of Blaxploitation

!e pursuit of authenticity is film’s dominant mode of historical representation. For the overwhelming majority of historical film makers and audiences, authenticity signifies a realistic historical experience, an effective suspension of temporal-spatial disbelief. Authenticity, as the engine of mainstream historical filmmaking, has three chief functions: as an aesthetic strategy, a reception discourse and a marketing discourse. A feeling, a form of perception and (supposed) knowledge, the aesthetic success of By Mattias Frey

The Authenticity Feeling: Language and Dialect in the Historical Film

This article analyses the authenticity principles connected to Hollywood’s portrayal of China and the Chinese through three important American films screened or banned in China – Broken Blossoms (1...

Qijun Han

Papers

THE Anxiety of Authenticity: THE Historical Reception of Broken Blossoms (1919), Shanghai Express (1932) and The Good Earth (1937) in China