Acting out: Images of Asians and the performance of American identities, 1898--1945 (Sessue Hayakawa)

The dissertation addresses the interaction between popular culture, legislation, and economic expansion in defining American identities in the first half of the 20th century. My project moves away from the characterization of film and theater representation of Asians as immutable stereotypes and reliance on a black-white racial binarism for understanding American politics and culture. By historicizing Asian images, I show how they provide unique understanding of the development of conceptions of race, art, and national identity. By rereading yellowface, or donning of an Asian guise, I study how a cultural apparatus supportive of the United States' ambitions to establish itself as a global economic and political superpower emerged. Asian images can thus be treated as complex manifestations of the collective public definition of “Americanness” in a global context.; The dissertation argues that yellowface helped facilitate the birth of a national conception of theater and film sensitive to the United States' expansionist ambitions and exclusionary domestic politics. By interpreting images of Asians in the context of the United States' search for new markets and global power, I explore the relationship between the formation of whiteness and one-dimensional yellowface. I study why artists, businessmen, and critics involved in constructing a distinctly American voice in theater and silent film repeatedly invested in the creation of an American Orient. An American Orient framed expansion into the Pacific Rim as a racial right and enshrined urban white middle-class values as the national norm. Yellowface provided the venue through which new European arrivals and self-proclaimed Anglo-Saxon natives could imagine themselves as advancing together in establishing American dominance abroad and white privilege at home.; Yellowface proved a vulnerable foundation for a vast structure of political, class, and racial dominance. Through the career of Sessue Hayakawa, I show how Asian artists disturbed the one-dimensional nature of yellowface and thereby disrupted the cultural logic that justified hierarchies of power based upon images of Asian subjection. Hayakawa's work shows the importance of entertainment venues in refiguring imagined racial positions with social and political power.