From Inner Worlds to Outer Space, and: Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s (review)

Krystyn Moon's Yellowface and Dan Kwong's From Inner Worlds to Outer Space share an investment in archiving Asian American performance: the former is a critical history of a wide array of performers and records across a comparatively large timeframe; the latter a collection of and commentary about the author's solo work over the last decade of the 20th century. Despite their generic and temporal distinctions, both texts provide useful documentation of, and raise pertinent questions about, the intersecting fields of Asian American, theatre, and performance studies.

Moon focuses on music but includes some discussion of spectacle in terms of songbook design and musical transcription as well as live performance. The first chapter, "Imagining China: Early Nineteenth-Century Writings and Musical Productions," deals with the antecedents of the book's titular time period. The author locates aural signifiers of Chineseness, such as a singer's "high, drawling, falsetto tone" (13), through and alongside European traditions of Chinoiserie, including the songs "Moo-Lee-Chwa" and "The Peyho Boatmen," that the U.S. imported with an understanding of Chinese music and theatre as "noise"; she carefully notes here, as she does throughout, departures from this motif—in this case, Christian missionaries' praise of Chinese hymnal singing. Chapter two, "Toward Exclusion: American Popular Songs on Chinese Immigration, 1850-1882," traces the emergence of stereotypical representations of Chineseness in U.S. music and theatre from the period of early Chinese immigration until the Chinese Exclusion Act. In "Chinese and Chinese Immigrant Performers on the American Stage, 1830s-1920s," (chapter three), Moon surveys performances by Chinese and Chinese Americans in venues ranging from circuses to funeral marches, theatres to world expositions. In chapters four and five, "The Sounds of Chinese Otherness and American Popular Music, 1880s-1920s," and "From Aversion to Fascination: New Lyrics and Voices, 1880s-1920s," respectively, Moon argues that sound contributed substantively to the processes of racializing Chinese/Americans from the last decades of the 19th century onward, as transcriptions of Chinese music and aural cues connoting Chineseness became more available, and as lyricists and performers began to create more work on purportedly Chinese subjects, including J. Henry Benrimo and George Hazelton's The Yellow Jacket (1913). Moon concludes Yellowface by examining the contradictions engendered by Chinese and Chinese American vaudeville acts in the first two decades of the 20th century.

While Moon draws on the scholarship of noted historians of Asian American performance such as James Moy and John Tchen,¹ she also contributes provocative analyses of relatively unknown archival material. For example, Moon probes racial intersections, like her fascinating—albeit brief—examination of African American renditions of yellowface in chapter five. Unfortunately, while rich in archival material, Moon's text is comparatively weak in discussions of the performances she identifies. She writes of the ways in which musical and stage depictions reinscribe Chinese "inferiority" in chapter two, but she offers little sustained explanation of how (e.g., mechanisms of distribution) and for whom (particular audiences, consumers, or producers) a specific cultural production reinforces or contests dominant images of Chineseness. To be fair, such lack of engagement may have everything to do with the extant materials available or unavailable for study. If this were the case, however, Moon might still have launched an explicit investigation of the process of constituting the archive in the first place.

Nevertheless, Moon is one of the few scholars to engage Asian American performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her appendix of songs with Chinese subjects or themes, and that of musicals, revues, and plays will undoubtedly facilitate further research to supplement the task of history-making that she has begun—the greatest contribution of Yellowface perhaps being...