Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

by Park, Jane Chi Hyun

• ISBN13: 9780816649792
• ISBN10: 0816649790
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-05
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

Yellow Futureexamines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style. Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city inBlade Runnerand the Japanese American mentor inThe Karate Kidto the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre inRush Hourand the mixed-race hero inThe Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility. Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood,Yellow Futurecenters on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed asstylein the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.

Author Biography

Jane Chi Hyun Park is lecturer of gender and cultural studies, University of Sydney, Australia.