Yellow Face, White Screen: Racial Performance, Media Technology, and Film Aesthetics in American Cinema, 1901-1949

Abstract

This dissertation studies the mutually constitutive ways in which a multitude of media technologies intersected with the racial formations of the so-called “Oriental” or the “yellow race” in the burgeoning screen culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Although yellowface performance was prevalent and conspicuous in this era of American cinema, this study focuses instead on how stars as well as ordinary people of Asian descent were recruited to perform Asianness as exotic – sometimes deadly – and explicitly racialized. The central claim of this dissertation is that these performances of Asianness and the racial and orientalist thinking underlying them were intrinsic to the conception of media technologies and film aesthetics, and formative, in particular, to the innovation of natural color cinematography, the transition to synchronized sound, the emergence of popular genres, and the consolidation of Hollywood’s hegemony in both domestic and global markets.