Envisioning Asia: On Location, Travel, and the Cinematic Geography of U.S. Orientalism

Notes

Notes introduction 1. Max J. Herzberg, foreword to Sarah M. Mullen, A Guide to the Discussion of the Screen Version of Pearl Buck’s Prize-Winning Novel The Good Earth (Newark, N.J.: Educational and Recreational Guides, 1937), 3, The Good Earth Production File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif. 2. The fact that “on location” referred to China as well as to an ersatz Chinese farming community meticulously staged in Chatsworth, California, highlights the constructed nature of authenticity in this example. 3. Jeffrey Ruoff,“The Filmic Fourth Dimension: Cinema as Audiovisual Vehicle ,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1. 4. The use of “Far East” to refer to Asia presumes that Europe is at the center of the world. My use of this somewhat outdated yet still relatively common term here and throughout this work is intended as a critique of this perspective and its construction of geographical distance and cultural difference. 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 12. 6. Ibid., 55. Geographers have taken up the term imaginative geographies to refer to the register of representation and to the cultural production of space and place; a number of scholars working in this ‹eld trace the genealogy of this term to Said’s work. As one introductory textbook puts it, “Imaginative geographies [are] representations of place, space and landscape that structure people’s understandings of the world, and in turn help to shape their actions. In the work of Edward Said, the term refers to the projection of images of identity and difference on to geographical space in a way that sustains unequal relationships of power”(Felix Driver ,“Imaginative Geographies,”in Introducing Human Geographies, ed. Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin, 2nd ed. [London: Hodder Arnold, 2005], 140). 7. The adjective American technically refers to all of North and South America , but following common usage in the United States, I use the term here speci‹cally in reference to the United States. 8. Said, Orientalism, 1–2. 9. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 178 n. 7. John R. Eperjesi describes his book The Imperialist Imaginary as a response to the question of whether Said’s work can “help us understand the history of U.S. expansion into Asia and the Paci‹c” (The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Paci‹c in American Culture [Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2005], 18–19). 215 10. For discussions of U.S. orientalism and East Asia, see Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994); Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999); Mae M. Ngai, “American Orientalism,” Reviews in American History 28 (September 2000): 408–15; Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Karen Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary. 11. See Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams; David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American : Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 12. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 4. 13. See esp. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994). 14. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 148. 15. Ibid., 147, 145. 16. Ibid., 145. 17. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 5. 18. BLT Genesis, directed by Evan J. Leong (Arowana Films/MTV Films, 2003). 19. Eugene Franklin Wong, On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Pictures (New York: Arno, 1978), 56–57, 73. Heathen Chinese and the Sunday School Teachers intimates improper interracial contact. The Chinese Rubbernecks is a comic scene featuring Chinese laundrymen, and The Yellow Peril plays on the reference to the nineteenth-century fear of hordes of invading Asians to describe an accident-prone Chinese servant. All...