Who Has the "Right Face" for America? Asian and Black Stereotypes, from the Nineteenth Century to Today (original) (raw)
Related papers
Race, Gender, and the Status-Quo: Asian and African American Relations in a Hollywood Film
Explorations in Ethnic Studies, 1994
Hollywood films play a significant role in constructing and reinforcing inter-eth nic tensions througH negative representa tions of Asian Americans and African Americans. While white males are most often depicted as smart and romantically desirable, thereby reinforcing an ideology of white male domi nance, Asian Americans and Blacks are typically diminished to demeaning and secondary status. Thi article explores these racist steretotypes in director Michael Cimino's 1 9985 film Year of the Dragon (as well as a number of other Hollywood films), arguing that such race and gender-specific imagery is functional; for while it promotes race/gender stereotypes, it also serves to rationalize white dominance as necessary to sustain the status-quo.
Unmasking Identities: Superhero Representations of Asian Americans in Graphic Narratives
This thesis is an examination of Asian American identity and the image of the superhero in Marvel comic books. I examine the authorship and depiction of the Asian American superhero in Marvel Comics focusing on representations of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and my intent is to uncover postcolonial themes in the creative works of the writers and artists. This research is a unique contribution to Asian American Studies and Comics Studies be examining contemporary means of cultural productions of the Asian American body as superhero in light of issues of race, class, and gender. My research focuses on mainstream publications of the superhero while many Comics Studies scholarship focuses on independent autobiographical narratives. For my research I focused on three contemporary Asian American Marvel superheroes: the nuclear powered Hazmat, the “Hypermind” Amadeus Cho, and Jimmy Woo leader of a former criminal organization. I made the decision to focus on these three characters to focus on representations American superheroes of Asian ethnic background and to focus on ethnic characters that played prominent roles in contemporary Marvel comics. Throughout this work, I highlight how Marvel writers and artists use a tactic called the Trojan Stereotype to subvert hegemonic representations of the Asian American body within the same Orientalist tropes used to characterize the Asian American body. I present how Hazmat, Amadeus Cho, and Jimmy Woo become sites of rhetorical space to expand the narrative and imagination of the Asian American body politic in American media. I conclude this thesis by noting that these comic book creators challenge the authority Orientalist stereotypes by subverting the very imagery which constitutes them.
Op-ed: Is ‘Shang-Chi,’ now the pandemic era’s biggest film hit, merely stereotyped cliches?
Chicago Tribune, 2021
On Monday, Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” achieved another box office milestone, surpassing $400 million in global box office revenues to become the biggest Hollywood film hit of the pandemic era, even while it cannot be shown in China. Though stunningly filmed and featuring breathtaking action sequences, the film left me wondering: Will all nonwhite Marvel heroes be relegated to stereotyped environments in which they are defined by references to their racial and ethnic identities?
Critical Studies in Media Communication , 2023
This article examines the portrayal of Asian and Black characters in Sony/Marvel Studios' Spider-Man trilogy. We analyze Ned Leeds, Brad Davis, Liz Allan, and M.J. "Michelle Jones-Watson," as well as minor characters, through the lens of racial triangulation (Kim, 1999). We focus not only on traditional white/Asian/Black comparisons across racial groups, but also on sub-triangulations within groups, such as positioning Black women in comparison to other Black women or Black men, or Asian men to other Asian men or Asian women, along with comparisons to white representations. Despite the trilogy's diverse cast, Ned, Brad, Liz, and M.J. remain separated from and in opposition to one another, with their existence and purpose constructed around their relationship and/or relevance to Peter Parker (Spider-Man), the white main character. The trilogy furthermore employs longstanding stereotypes about people of Asian and Black descent to help maintain whiteness at the top of all triangulations. We argue for a greater need to push beyond surface representations of "diversity" to consider how media actually represent different groups.
N/A, 2020
In this dissertation, I analyzed how East Asian (American) and Southeast Asian characters were characterized in the 2018 Hollywood film, Crazy Rich Asians (CRA), and argued, that the film was covertly racist towards Asians in its representations. I have done this with the help of Said’s (1978) theories of Orientalism and the notion of intertextuality as well as Hall’s (2013; 1995) theories of representation, discourse and ideological sustainment in media. In the literature review, I demonstrated that anti-Asiatic racism has existed in various cultural and academic productions throughout the history of Asian immigration to the West and the history of Western intervention and invasion in Asia. In doing so, I showed (1) that the anti-Asiatic racism embedded in socio-political sphere could influence the representations of Asians even when the government does not approve it, and (2) that the racist representations of Asians were transformed from "coolie" to "model minority" due to the gradual but significant changes in socio-political climate. Through my analysis and discussion of CRA, I argued that implicit racism was implemented through “Orientalist/Assimilationist paradigm” (McAlister, 1992 cited by Yin, 2005), a narrative pattern also used for a previous Hollywood film, The Joy Luck Club (1993). In addition, I illustrated how "good Chinese" and "bad Chinese" characters in CRA were associated with "good Euro-American" and "bad Asian" values, thereby implicitly creating "racial" and cultural hierarchy.
2010
The mass media industry as a hegemonic entity has played a vital role in displaying fallacious accounts of black life. Grounded in ideas from scholars like Richard Schechner, Patricia Ticineto, Joseph Roach and Sara Ahmed, this research is a critique of the ways in which memory, and its possible manifestations, plays in non-blacks' (specifically whites) interpretation, motivation, and perception of stereotypical visual portrayals of blackness. The focus will be on how the continuing phenomenon of stereotyping blackness in the 20 th and 21 st centuries is perpetuated in child-targeted feature-length animations with animal characters. I argue that the possible furtive and/or involuntary visual manifestations of -black identity‖ in animation have their sources in a white historical memory that clings to the desire to maintain whiteness. This work demonstrates how ideas of blackness in white memory were not solely constructed from the imaginations of producers of mainstream culture. Rather black stereotypes are the result of a combination of black protest against negative portrayals, blacks as accomplices in perpetuating their negative stereotypes, and whites' imagined ways of blackness. Following the work of Anna Everett and Robin Kelly and commentary from Bert Williams and George Walker, the perpetuation of whiteness through imagined black ii identities in media outlets does not take into account the ways in which blacks think of and present themselves within black communities, the ways blacks display their identity outside the constraints of white imagination, or how blacks openly or discreetly oppose stereotypical caricatures. However, the change in the portrayal of black people after the Civil Rights Movement (1945-1964) is the result of the powerful black collective voice influencing change in nefarious deceptions of African-Americans in media outlets. This change, according to Donald Bogle, Robert M. Entman and Andrew Rojecki, however, simply gave new faces to old caricatures. Therefore, the continued practice of stereotyping blacks by way of dated Enlightenment thinking regardless of black protest speaks to the pervasiveness of -blackness‖ via the malignant ideology of whiteness. The desire to sustain ideologies and practices of mainstream media has prevented the erasure of black caricatures. The compromise between portrayals of whiteness and holistic portrayals of black life is more sophisticated making black caricatures more elusive, but still evident. Through a critical evaluation of Scrub Me Mama, Shark Tale and Madagascar, this research will demonstrate how ideas of Enlightenment theories of race from the 17 th and 18 th centuries has a prolonged history that leads to anthropomorphic animation of the 21 st century.
Stereotypical Image of Chinese People in Hollywood’s The Karate Kid 2010 Movie
Wanastra: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra
Hollywood is an important media for the United States in spreading Western ideology. The hundreds years, Hollywood has featured various characters from different cultures and countries. However, they have suffered from cultural racism along with other minority groups. In American movie, the East depicted as ignorant and backward with a considered inferior culture compared to the west. This situation is known as orientalism, has influenced and controlled the mass media (films) and Western society's perceptions. This study aims to determine how eastern culture is depicted in the American film, The Karate Kid. This study uses Edward Said's Orientalism theory, which explained how the westerner views the east. The analysis concludes that the Hollywood industry reflects the superiority of the west over China through the character of Dre Parker. Hence, the portrayal of Chinese characters is displayed with stereotypes such as yellow faces, skin color racism, slanted eyes, bullying, and alcoholic habit.
How the Green Hornet Became Chinese: Cross-Racial Mimicry and Superhero Localization in Hong Kong
Transformative Works and Cultures, 2019
The Green Hornet television series (1966-1967), with Bruce Lee in the role of Kato, the Hornet's sidekick, was broadcast in Hong Kong in 1968. In the subsequent decades, characters referencing the Green Hornet emerged repeatedly in Hong Kong popular culture, and instead of being Anglo-American like the original Hornet, they have all been ethnically Chinese. Scholarship suggests that fans of color are excluded from identifying with or performing white characters, however this does not appear to be the case for Hong Kong fans. This essay uses Homi Bhabha's idea of colonial mimicry to argue that Hong Kong fans arrive at ethnically Chinese inhabiting the Green Hornet by exploiting Kato's partial inclusion as an Asian American and as a sidekick. In addition, as a colonial audience, Hong Kong fans were well-positioned to poach from a transcultural text such as The Green Hornet, and make this cross-racial move.