Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-Ethnic Performance. By Hye Seung Chung. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. xxii, 232 pp. Cloth, $66.50, ISBN 1-59213-515-3. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 1-59213-516-1.)
2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/25095078
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Japanese History and Culture
ResumoIn the past few years, a handful of scholarly biographies have begun to appear on the classical Hollywood stars Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa, including such books as Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend (2004) by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong (1905–1961) (2003) by Anthony Chan, and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (2007) by Daisuke Miyao. By bringing to light the neglected stories of those Asian American film pioneers and the ways in which they resisted and negotiated the forces of institutionalized racism in the studio system, those studies provide an important contribution to U.S. film and ethnic histories. Hye Seung Chung's Hollywood Asian adds an eclectic “critical biography” of the Korean American actor Philip Ahn to this emerging body of scholarship. Drawing on viewings of the actor's roles in a number of movies and television shows from the 1930s to the 1970s as well as archival records of his life and career and the Hollywood movie industry at large, Chung paints a fascinating portrait of an Asiatic actor whose “mask-like” face was seen as the perfect template to represent the panethnic “oriental” during this period—in “China cycle” movies such as The General Died at Dawn (1936), King of Chinatown (1939), and China Sky (1945); liberal “oriental romance” Cold War films such as Japanese War Bride (1952), Battle Hymn (1957), and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1967); and television shows such as Kung Fu (1972–1975) and M*A*S*H (1972–1983).
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