Special Topics Seminar: Yellowface: Perils and Potentials of Cross-Racial Performance

Yellowface (i.e. casting non-Asian, mostly white, performers in “Asian” roles) has been commonly practiced from the late 19th-c. American theater to the 20th-c. film and stage. With the Civil Rights Movement, especially the Asian-American communities’ struggle for equal rights, the yellowface practice has been chastised for misrepresenting Asian ethnicities and cultures while depriving ethnic Asian performers of work opportunities. These issues concerning figurative representation and labor-capital tension point to the underlying racial politics inherent in Western imperialism and colonialism. In film, such Euro-American-centric politics are oftentimes facilitated by the developing audio-visual technologies as well as the narrative strategies. And yet, the filmic mediation of such politics is by no means transparent or unambiguous. In this course, we will not only critique the implied racial politics of yellowface--a well-rehearsed ideological project since the Civil Rights Movement. But more importantly, we will also fathom the intricate processes of producing and performing the yellowface, tease out the lacunae and aporia in the construction and performance of racial stereotypes, explore the ways in which yellowface may contain conditions of its own undoing, and finally, speculate the possibilities that cross-racial casting and racial masquerade may deconstruct essentialist identity categories and the “racial epidermal schema” (Franz Fanon), question the privilege of entitlement, while fostering empowering identity configurations and relationality via today’s wide spectrum of screen, stage, TV, internet, video games and other media arenas. We will undertake this study through examining a range of yellowface performers and their film works, combined with media coverage of this practice. We will then tackle recent examples of cross-racial casting and performance, and ask how they intersect with the post-racial discourse, with what implications for identity reconstruction and performance in the global media industry and its correlated labor-capital relationship. Finally, we will consider racial masquerade in the virtual space.