Off-white : yellowface and chinglish by Anglo-American culture / Sheng-mei Ma.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ma, Sheng-mei, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chinese in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--United States--History.

Motion pictures.

United States.

History.

China--In motion pictures.

China.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) in motion pictures.

Chinese in literature.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature.

American fiction--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 246 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Summary:

"How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an "off-yellow," darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction

Pearl and Jade and Yellowface and Chinglish

Stereograph-cum-Stereotype: Maugham's and Kingston's Chinas

Chink in Our Holmes: Oriental Sesame and Anglo-American Detective

Dr. Fu-Judge Dee: Serial Yellowface of, for, by the White People

Ghost in the White Shell

What's UP, Sam Wah?: Whitewashing Chinese Laundry

Morphing Bingxue: Alchemical Poetics in Taoist Monkey and Nordic Beowulf CGI8

China's Orient in Fan de Siècle Culture

An MSU-within-MSU: Mandarin-Speaking Undergraduates Writing "Chinglish"

Ishiguro's White Dolls

Coda: That's Rich!: Asian Americans Author(iz)ing Crazy rich Asians.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Ma, Sheng-mei, Off-white

ISBN:

9781501352201

1501352202

OCLC:

1101026525