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Books by Karen Fang
Stanford University Press, 2017
edited collection in Routledge Advances in Film Studies series, 2017
University of Virginia Press, 2010
198 often anonymous content. While Cronin certainly acknowledges these attributes, his emphasis r... more 198 often anonymous content. While Cronin certainly acknowledges these attributes, his emphasis remains on the stratagems of individual authors -and his study thereby remains rooted in a fairly traditional version of the Romantic ideal of authorship.
Hong Kong University Press, 2004
Papers by Karen Fang
UMI Dissertation Services eBooks, 2002
China Review International, 2016
China's influence in Hollywood arose so rapidly and massively that it is sometimes hard to grasp ... more China's influence in Hollywood arose so rapidly and massively that it is sometimes hard to grasp the exact circumstances of its impact. In 2015 for
Journal of Film and Video, 2009
Duke University Press eBooks, May 29, 2003
Journal of Film and Video, Jul 1, 2009
and spent nearly a month as the only child in an immigrant detention center on Angel Island. 1 Th... more and spent nearly a month as the only child in an immigrant detention center on Angel Island. 1 This personal trajectory of triumph despite formidable odds gained additional publicity with Wong's death in late 2016, as his obituaries provided a compelling counterpoint to the anti-immigrant vitriol by which Trump had rode into office. 2 Yet by late 2019 and early 2020, as headlines regarding COVID-19 and its acknowledged origin in China exacerbated anti-Asian racism, Wong's biography took on a newly reinforced topical currency. At the time I was waiting on files I had requested from the US National Archives and Records Administration, as part of my research into Wong's immigration history, as well as planning return trips to Los Angeles to continue exploring production files on the films he had worked at Warner Bros. But while the pandemic had now delayed those files indefinitely, I also realized that in some sense those papers were no longer necessary, as I myself was experiencing something akin to the contrast between art and anti-Asian discrimination that had loomed large in Wong's life. 3 This essay is both a methodological discussion of the research challenges and workarounds that arose as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a cultural narrative about the unique importance that archives and documentary access exert for Asian American identity and experienceparticularly in the context of the 2020 pandemic and other related crises that year. For Spectator's disciplinary readers, Wong's multimedia career is a fascinating example of Hollywood's below-theline workers, particularly as skilled visual artists like Wong connect cinema with other markets
Film-Philosophy, Sep 1, 2003
Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-... more Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-85984-203-8 372 pp.
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
Prism
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
Prism
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
China Review International, 2016
Imprinted: Illustrating Race (exhibition catalog), 2022
In fact, Shang-Chi is not the only recent Hollywood superhero movie to be celebrated for its path... more In fact, Shang-Chi is not the only recent Hollywood superhero movie to be celebrated for its pathbreaking depiction of a nonwhite protagonist. In 2018, Black Panther portrayed an African prince whose technologically advanced, fiercely self-reliant culture underlies the film's incisive critique of American indifference to economic underdevelopment in urban Black communities. This parallel between the two superhero films' intentional rewriting of racial stereotypes is not coincidental. Like African Americans, Asian Americans have long been subjected to derogatory visual representation, and the particular stereotypes of foreignness, dirtiness, and parasitic impact on domestic culture and economy that have long plagued Asian Americans sadly continue to exist, even as significant progress is being made against African American stereotypes. But as the parallel histories of Shang-Chi and Black Panther also show, understanding the origins of those stereotypes also offers a blueprint for remaking that imagery into more positive images better suited for contemporary American ideals.
Asian American Literary Studies
Stanford University Press, 2017
edited collection in Routledge Advances in Film Studies series, 2017
University of Virginia Press, 2010
198 often anonymous content. While Cronin certainly acknowledges these attributes, his emphasis r... more 198 often anonymous content. While Cronin certainly acknowledges these attributes, his emphasis remains on the stratagems of individual authors -and his study thereby remains rooted in a fairly traditional version of the Romantic ideal of authorship.
Hong Kong University Press, 2004
UMI Dissertation Services eBooks, 2002
China Review International, 2016
China's influence in Hollywood arose so rapidly and massively that it is sometimes hard to grasp ... more China's influence in Hollywood arose so rapidly and massively that it is sometimes hard to grasp the exact circumstances of its impact. In 2015 for
Journal of Film and Video, 2009
Duke University Press eBooks, May 29, 2003
Journal of Film and Video, Jul 1, 2009
and spent nearly a month as the only child in an immigrant detention center on Angel Island. 1 Th... more and spent nearly a month as the only child in an immigrant detention center on Angel Island. 1 This personal trajectory of triumph despite formidable odds gained additional publicity with Wong's death in late 2016, as his obituaries provided a compelling counterpoint to the anti-immigrant vitriol by which Trump had rode into office. 2 Yet by late 2019 and early 2020, as headlines regarding COVID-19 and its acknowledged origin in China exacerbated anti-Asian racism, Wong's biography took on a newly reinforced topical currency. At the time I was waiting on files I had requested from the US National Archives and Records Administration, as part of my research into Wong's immigration history, as well as planning return trips to Los Angeles to continue exploring production files on the films he had worked at Warner Bros. But while the pandemic had now delayed those files indefinitely, I also realized that in some sense those papers were no longer necessary, as I myself was experiencing something akin to the contrast between art and anti-Asian discrimination that had loomed large in Wong's life. 3 This essay is both a methodological discussion of the research challenges and workarounds that arose as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a cultural narrative about the unique importance that archives and documentary access exert for Asian American identity and experienceparticularly in the context of the 2020 pandemic and other related crises that year. For Spectator's disciplinary readers, Wong's multimedia career is a fascinating example of Hollywood's below-theline workers, particularly as skilled visual artists like Wong connect cinema with other markets
Film-Philosophy, Sep 1, 2003
Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-... more Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-85984-203-8 372 pp.
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
Prism
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
Prism
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
China Review International, 2016
Imprinted: Illustrating Race (exhibition catalog), 2022
In fact, Shang-Chi is not the only recent Hollywood superhero movie to be celebrated for its path... more In fact, Shang-Chi is not the only recent Hollywood superhero movie to be celebrated for its pathbreaking depiction of a nonwhite protagonist. In 2018, Black Panther portrayed an African prince whose technologically advanced, fiercely self-reliant culture underlies the film's incisive critique of American indifference to economic underdevelopment in urban Black communities. This parallel between the two superhero films' intentional rewriting of racial stereotypes is not coincidental. Like African Americans, Asian Americans have long been subjected to derogatory visual representation, and the particular stereotypes of foreignness, dirtiness, and parasitic impact on domestic culture and economy that have long plagued Asian Americans sadly continue to exist, even as significant progress is being made against African American stereotypes. But as the parallel histories of Shang-Chi and Black Panther also show, understanding the origins of those stereotypes also offers a blueprint for remaking that imagery into more positive images better suited for contemporary American ideals.
Asian American Literary Studies
Panorama, 2021
The term "Asian American art" was propagated in the late 1960s by activists eng... more The term "Asian American art" was propagated in the late 1960s by activists engaged with the contemporary racial justice movement and may therefore imply a politicized and oppositional aesthetics. The label can be misleading for ethnic Asian artists practicing before the late 1960s, whose biography and aesthetic concerns differ. 1 For example, celebrated watercolor painter Dong Kingman (1911-2000) is known for an expressive watercolor style in which "lively impressions of America" are "handle[d by] brush in an adept Oriental fashion." 2 Dong's syncretic style reflects his biography as a native-born US citizen who started formal art education in China, studying with a teacher trained in both European and Chinese painting techniques. Far from the confrontational positioning of the generation that succeeded him, Dong found ready support within the US cultural establishment. In the 1930s, Dong was one of many young artists supported through the Depression by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and, in the mid-1950s, he traveled throughout Asia on behalf of the US State Department as part of a goodwill tour promoting transpacific relations.
PAPER PELLETS: BRITISH LITERARY CULTURE AFTER WATERLOO. By Richard Cronin. Oxford: Oxford Univers... more PAPER PELLETS: BRITISH LITERARY CULTURE AFTER WATERLOO. By Richard Cronin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 268. ISBN 978 0 19 958253 2. £99.00. The critical scholarship on periodicals and their impact on nineteenth-century literature has reached a new zenith with Richard Cronin's latest book, Paper Pellets. Back in 1989 Lynn Pykett, in an article published in Victorian Periodicals Review entitled 'Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context', felt obliged to caution aspiring scholars about the interdisciplinary and potentially infinite nature of periodical research. Building upon a seminal essay by Michael Wolff, Pykett observed that a truly informed study of periodicals would require familiarity with various temporal forms of publication, the many individual series within those subcategories, the miscellaneous content in each issue and the writers, editors and publishers of these publications as well as their circulation and audience - in sum, a mandat...
Introduction to Routledge volume, _Surveillance in Asian Cinema: Under Eastern Eyes_
Studies in Romanticism, 2012
Charles J. Rzepka. Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: In... more Charles J. Rzepka. Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 287. $99.95. As many of us no doubt have mentioned to our students, the diversity of thought that existed before the mid-nineteenth-century differentiation of disciplines was a significant reason for the vitality of intellectual production in the Romantic era. Cutting-edge science informed by microscopes and electricity experiments coexisted with Shelley's idealism and abstraction; philology, linguistics, and religion were all part of Coleridge's metaphysical stew; and the many different and often unrelated research and speculations that filled the pages of contemporary periodicals were both destined for and emanated from a motley intellectual arena that included amateurs as well as what would be recognized today as specialists or professionals. A similarly exhilarating mix of topics appears in Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions, a new volume that reprints some of Charles Rzepka's best essays of the past twenty years. In articles ranging from the Romantic canon to Poe, Freud, Elizabeth Bishop, Charlie Chan and the Wizard of Oz, Inventions and Interventions annals a scholarly career equally as distinguished for its eclecticism as for its accomplishment. One of the obvious pleasures of such a volume is the chance to track Rzepka's most important critical contributions, such as the recurring discussion of gifts and transactional relationships (featured in three articles on Wordsworth and De Quincey) that would culminate in Rzepka's illluminating Sacramental Commodities. The diversity of the topics also signals the interest in detection and crime narratives that have extended Rzepka's work beyond the geographical and temporal borders of British Romanticism, and which seem to lead his current interests (the three most recent essays are those on Poe, Charlie Chan, and Godwin). Indeed, in its astute synthesis of genre criticism, regional history, and Asian American studies, Rzepka's essay on Charlie Chan is particularly impressive. The essay, a revisionary interpretation which rejects orientalist charges for the much maligned character and instead argues for his generic and historical significance at a time when strictures against Asian immigration were extreme, anticipates Yunte Huang's much celebrated current book (Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History) by several years. Thus, while the topics of some of the later essays may at first seem surprising for Romantic scholars, one thing that the volume's collection helps reveal is the close connection between space, place, identity, and power that has always driven Rzepka's scholarship, and how his Romantic training shaped these more current interests. However, to suggest that the merits of Inventions and Interventions lies only in intellectual biography is to do the book a disservice, as it deflects attention from the conceptual achievements accrued by this compilation. A major attraction of the volume is its glimpse into detection as a critical practice, which only Rzepka's idiosyncratic mix of Romantic sensibilities and twentieth-century historical practice can demonstrate. Throughout all of the essays, Rzepka's facility for deductive analysis is repeatedly on display, as he poses scholarly queries, considers existing criticism (usually on a case-by-case basis), brings to bear historical context and contemporary texts (often based on the most tenuous or fleeting of coincidences), and works through critical problems by painstaking close reading (often facilitated by a colloquial restatement of key textual passages) and usually aided by sequences of rhetorical questions. …
China Review International, 2016
Surveillance & Society, May 2014
Studies in Romanticism (51:3) pp.467-70 , 2012
Journal of Film and Video, 2009
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6:1, 2005
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2003
Journal of Popular Culture, 2004
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2001
... The reader may be puzzled a bit by Sandi ford's introduction, which opens by referencing... more ... The reader may be puzzled a bit by Sandi ford's introduction, which opens by referencing the "first ... Sandiford's admixture of a French text in an otherwise strictly English col lection points up ... by Mather Byles (chapter 1), and The Dunciad in relation to works by Timothy Dwight and ...