Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

1. Style, Visibility, Future

Yellow Future builds upon and contributes to ongoing conversations in ethnic studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies around Orientalism , technology, and multiculturalism. In the following pages I show how a critical examination of “oriental style” can bring some of these conversations together. I end by focusing on the title of this book, meditating on how future might be made to mean something other than the goal of a progressive multicultural narrative or the “positive” representation of a marginal group in the dominant culture. Such a narrative not only falsely equates visibility with power but also assumes that members of marginal groups always and automatically would want to become part of that culture. Rather than perpetuating this flawed logic by condemning oriental images in Hollywood films for their marginality or celebrating them for their emerging presence in the mainstream, I suggest instead that we look closely and carefully at how oriental style is marginal and what kind of cultural work it does in and at the margins. How does this style inhabit the background of popular films? How does it reinforce and critique the ideologies they articulate with regard to gender, sexuality, class, and nation as well as race and ethnicity? Finally, how does it gesture—awkwardly and sometimes poignantly—toward subjects, histories, and experiences that these films cannot and will not recognize? By raising these questions I hope to open up the possibility of imagining different kinds of futures and of imagining our collective future differently. 1 1 Style, Visibility, Future If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture. —Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance Reworking Orientalism In 1978 Edward Said coined the term “Orientalism” to describe a tendency in the West to represent the Middle East as a fantastic, ahistorical space to be occupied and to portray its peoples and cultures as objects to be consumed. Said’s book Orientalism analyzes the ways in which such representations place the East in a dependent role vis-à-vis the West, reinforcing the power of the latter to speak about and for the former. Although this power is grounded in the economic disparity between the West and the so-called Rest that is the legacy of European imperialism, Said stresses that it is maintained less directly through intertextual networks that operate at the level of superstructure. Orientalism is thus “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into literary, philological, and historical texts . . . a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power.”1 Instead of confining this colonizing discourse to a particular group of texts or fields, Said treats it as a set of political and cultural strategies that contains and controls the Asiatic through a double movement. Orientalism lumps the plethora of different ethnicities, cultures, and nations that exist on and around the Asian continent into one category: the Orient.2 At the same time, it fragments this seemingly monolithic category into what Lisa Lowe has called “manageable parts,” often interchangeable, which are deemed economically, politically, and culturally useful, once again, for and by the West.3 The category of the Orient was produced in the period of the Enlightenment , the same period to which Michel Foucault has traced the historical origins of the“normalizing gaze”central to the colonization project.4 According to Foucault, the authoritative gaze of the dominant group (rendered as subjects) normalizes and naturalizes marginal groups (rendered as objects) in order to“know”and thus control them through that knowledge. The gaze of the dominant group normalizes by placing members of marginal groups within a teleological narrative of progress in which the goal is to become as much like the de facto normal member of the dominant culture as possible. At the same time, it naturalizes by containing these others within deterministic scientific laws that preclude them from achieving the goal of normality . The normalizing gaze thus has the effect of distancing the humanized 2 • STYLE, VISIBILITY, FUTURE subject (figured as the mind) not only from the objectified other (figured as the body) but also, crucially, from traits of the other within himself, a point to which I will return in later sections. Said draws parallels between the ways in which the normalizing gaze of the West...