History

Committee Members: Linda Espana-Maram, Krystyn Moon

Winner:

Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom, by Daisuke Miyao

In recent years, Asian American history has taken the field of U.S. history by storm with scholars winning prestigious prizes from the Organization of American Historians and the American Historians Association, to name just a few. The high caliber of works being published made serving on this year’s award committee a most exciting and enriching experience. The committee unanimously chose to present the award to Daisuke Miyao for Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom.

For scholars and teachers of Asian American studies, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 film, The Cheat, has long held an established place in the field of Asian American studies as the prime example of early-twentieth-century cinematic “yellow peril” narratives. Until the appearance of Daisuke Miyao’s study, a detailed work on the life and career of the film’s undeniable star, Sessue Hayakawa, remained a glaring absence in the field. Miyao’s book moves beyond providing a richly documented narrative of Hayakawa’s struggles and mediations with a fledgling American film industry as one of the few nonwhite actors during a period noted more for its “yellow face” performances and anti-Asian political movements and legal formations that rendered Asians as “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” In an impressive work of transnational cultural studies and cultural history scholarship, Miyao pursues his subject across the Pacific and Atlantic, drawing on personal and family letters and memorabilia along with newspapers, cinematic journals, and other archival records in Japan, Europe, and the United States to demonstrate how Hayakawa came to garner tremendous local and international success among such diverse national movie audiences. Miyao convincingly demonstrates how Hayakawa’s negotiations between his star image as an Americanized Japanese created by Hollywood studios for American consumption and the equally powerful demands of a nationalist Japanese spectatorship for a “real” representation of Japan to the West reveals larger transnational discourses of cultural authenticity, modernity, and national formation in the early twentieth century. As the trend toward transnational history has taken hold in the field of Asian American studies, Miyao’s ambitious examination of a wider global field for cross-cultural interaction, cultural production, and racial formation will hopefully inspire other scholars to do the same.