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The often-racist portrayals of Asians in Hollywood productions of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier decades constitutes one facet of a double-bind within which Asian Americans have historically found themselves. Bearing in mind wider cultural, economic, and political discourses surrounding Asian American communities in the postwar period, it is important to closely consider specific cinematic representations of Asians during this period. This article argues that 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964) operates as a strange and conflicted film informed by progressive science fiction literature and many of the sentiments that would come to define revisionist westerns. Charles Beaumont's screenplay adaptation of Charles G. Finney's novel The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) infuses the film with clever and engaging dialogue and mirrors the concepts of reversal often present in Beaumont's work. Furthermore, Beaumont's screenplay offers insightful takes on racial and generic dynamics in a film that might otherwise be dismissed as an egregious example of harmful yellowface practices. Thus, viewing 7 Faces of Dr. Lao as a prototypical revisionist western draws attention to its engagement with concepts of reversal and critique of stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During times of crisis such as the Covid-19 pandemic, digital platforms are under public scrutiny to guarantee users’ online safety and wellbeing. Following inconsistencies in how platforms moderate online content and behavior, governments around the world are putting pressure on them to curb the spread of illegal and lawful harmful content and behavior (e.g., UK’s Draft Online Safety Bill). These efforts, though, mainly focus on overt abuse and false information, which misses more mundane social media practices such as racial stereotyping that are equally popular and can be inadvertently harmful. Building on Stoever’s (2016) work on the “sonic color line,” this article problematizes sound, specifically, as a key element in racializing memetic practices on the popular short-video platform TikTok. We examine how humorous audio-visual memes about Covid-19 on TikTok contribute to social inequality by normalizing racial stereotyping, as facilitated through TikTok’s “Use This Sound” feature. We found that users’ appropriations of sounds and visuals on TikTok, in combination with the platform’s lack of clear and transparent moderation processes for humorous content, reinforce and (re)produce systems of advantage based on race. Our article contributes to remediating the consistent downplaying of humor that negatively stereotypes historically marginalized communities. It also advances work on race and racism on social media by foregrounding the sonification of race as means for racism’s evolving persistence, which represents a threat to social cohesion.

This essay takes a postcolonial approach to trouble the celebratory notion that Crazy Rich Asians is unequivocal progress for Asian/American media representation. Using textual analysis, the essay reads Asian subjectivities portrayed in the movie in the context of race relations in the United States, in Singapore, and between the United States and Asia. The essay concludes by discussing how yellowface mockery and ambivalence center whiteness in different ways for Asia-Asians and Asian Americans, and it argues for the continued relevance of yellowface theorizations for unpacking representations of Asian/American subjectivities in filmic texts that are produced by, for, and with Asians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

O tema central do projeto é o de pesquisar sobre o conceito “yellowface” e a falta de representatividade de asiáticos em programas televisivos ocidentais. Essa pesquisa tem como objetivo principal encontrar soluções que possam responder ao questionamento do que faz com que os amarelos sejam representados, na maioria das vezes, de maneira rotulada e estereotipada, ou, até mesmo, não representados, como é o caso de várias produções midiáticas que representam o asiático de maneira caricata e ofensiva. Durante o período, alguns conceitos e autores foram abordados, como o de opinião pública por Walter Lippmann e o de estereótipo para Stuart Hall. Além desses citados, foi realizada uma análise das imagens do filme “Bonequinha de Luxo” a partir do conceito de estereotipo de Peter Burke; revisão bibliográfica no conceito de yellowface no cinema e definição do conceito de estereotipo a partir do conceito também de Peter Burke. Para finalizar, O livro de Serge Moscovici, Representações Sociais, me ajudou a entender representações sociais como meios de recriar a realidade.

It is now widely acknowledged that the postracial fantasies ushered in by Barack Obama’s two-term election success are now in tatters. Yet debates on yellowface casting practices in contemporary Hollywood (also said to have evolved into “whitewashing” practices), in such films as The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), have resurfaced in recent times. These press controversies seem almost anachronistic after a generation of “intercultural” artistic theory and practice, “diversity” management training, and numerous academic discourses on otherness and difference, including those on cosmopolitan theory and practice. This article reviews yellowface practices and debates in contemporary times and puts them in dialogue with cosmopolitan aspirations of being “open to difference”, and argues that the latter cannot be taken as self-evident. It offers a way of thinking about yellowface practice via cosmopolitan pleasures evoked largely through modes of consumption, which “hollow out” the subjectivity of the character being depicted. On the site of the intersection between representation and subjectivity is where the identity politics occurs, yet, rather than universalising the issue, the article argues that a cosmopolitan approach should take on board localised conditions and contexts of production and reception in ways that acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the issues at hand.

When encountering non-Asians masquerading as Asians in yellowface in twenty-first-century stage musical performances, I feel righteously angry, profoundly sad, and racially alienated. Yet musical theatre promises pleasure and enables the disavowal of complicity with systemic racist violence, as patrons, performers, and producers use their enjoyment to rationalize racial hierarchy. How does racial identity shape reactions to musicals? In turn, how do these reactions shore up and take down structural racism? This article theorizes "feeling yellow," how Asian Americans are moved and made in response to representation. Though grounded in racial inequality and difference, feeling yellow ultimately wields the potential to generate new pleasures by using feminist queer of color critique to redistribute misery and form communities of fellow feeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the success of The Gondoliers (1889), Gilbert wrote to Sullivan: ‘It gives one the chance of shining right through the twentieth century.’ However, while this prophecy was largely fulfilled, clouds of cultural disapproval have darkened over the Savoy operas since the start of the present century, especially with regard to the mockery of women's education at the heart of Princess Ida (1884) and, most pointedly, the demeaning and ostensibly racist depiction of the Japanese in The Mikado (1885). On the other hand, the largely overlooked Utopia, Limited (1893) has experienced a boom in productions over the last decade, seemingly due to its subject matter, which, as one recent critic put it, make it ‘an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist comic opera’. He also argues that, while some of the traditional performance practices associated with The Mikado ought to be re-evaluated, recent objections to the spirit of the opera as a whole are not entirely justified, and that a re-evaluation of the validity of some (but not all) of the performance practices traditionally associated with The Mikado is both just and timely. Alan Fischler is a Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. He is the author of Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (University of Virginia Press, 1991) and ‘Drama’ in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), among many other articles on Gilbert and nineteenth-century theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Grounding our evidence in Karl Lagerfeld'sParis-Shanghai: A Fantasy, a filmic homage to Coco Chanel, we theorize a “visual rhetoric of containment,” which limits the subjectivity of the racial Other and consolidates whiteness. The visual rhetoric of containment manifests in four ways: the creation and enactment of “the yellowface gaze,” which affirms whiteness through the eyes of the “native” Other, the affirmation of a post-feminist model of exchange, which objectifies the Chinese, the representation of Chanel as a master of place and order, and the conception of time as a constraint that Chanel, but not the Chinese people, can transcend. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]