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Yellow Future
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Yellow Future
Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema
Jane Chi Hyun Park
University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 6 were previously published in Jane Chi Hyun Park, “Virtual
Race,” in Mixed Race Hollywood, ed. Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas (New York:
New York University Press, 2008), 182–202; reprinted with permission from New York
University Press.
Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Park, Jane Chi Hyun.

Yellow future : oriental style in Hollywood cinema / Jane Chi Hyun
Park.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-4979-2 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-4980-8
(pb : alk. paper)
1. Asians in motion pictures. 2. Asian Americans in motion pictures.
3. Asia—In motion pictures. 4. Motion pictures—United States—
History—20th century. I. Title.
PN1995.9.A78P38 2010
791.43´652995—dc22
2010020852
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction vii
1. Style, Visibility, Future 1
2. An Oriental Past 29
3. American Anxiety and the Oriental City 51
4. Oriental Buddies and the Disruption of Whiteness 83
5. Martial Arts as Oriental Style 125
6. The Virtual Orient 163
Afterword 197
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 205
Index 227
Introduction
Race . . . has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily

discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever
before.
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Appropriately enough, the idea for this book came from a movie. Several
summers ago I saw the science-fiction classic Brazil (1984) on the big screen
for the first time. I had seen the film many times on television as a Korean
American girl growing up in the American Midwest and Southwest of the
1980s, yet watching it again as a slightly more critical adult I was struck
by two startling images in the dream sequences, of which, oddly, I had no
memory.
The first image was that of a huge samurailike robot attacking the hero,
who had been transformed from a meek, emasculated bureaucrat into a glo-
rious flying knight in shining armor, the second that of hunchbacked Asiatic
dwarves dragging the caged heroine, who had also undergone a dramatic
makeover from a tough mechanic to a silent, hyperfeminized damsel in dis-
tress. In all the sequences the protagonists were centered in the frame and
bathed in celestial three-point light, which had the effect of accentuating
their whiteness. In stark contrast, the orientalized figures were fragmented
and shot in shadow, their presence accompanied by ominous, menacing
music. As dehumanized enemies in the hero’s escape fantasies, the figures
seemed to stand for the oppressive social institutions undergirding director
Terry Gilliam’s vision of a bleak, technocratic future. As threatening objects
that easily blended into the background, they literally embodied the spaces,
sounds, and movements used to convey that vision onscreen. I found myself
wondering how I could have missed this oriental imagery in Brazil and what
it was doing in the film.
vii
viii • INTRODUCTION
In Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema I attempt to answer

these questions by looking at similarly fleeting references to East Asia as
futuristic and technologized in a range of Hollywood movies since the 1980s,
when such references became prevalent in the film industry and in U.S.
popular culture more generally. By contextualizing these references within
the social, economic, and cultural developments of this period, I consider
the ways in which East Asian peoples and places have become closely linked
with various forms of technology in recent years to produce a collective fan-
tasy of the futuristic, high-tech Orient—or East Asia as the future.
Imprinted in the national consciousness and exported to the rest of the
world through media, this fantasy is based on and sustained through imagery,
iconography, and modes of performance that conflate East Asia with tech-
nology in a global, multicultural context, constituting what I call oriental
style. Central to my exploration of oriental style is the idea not only of tech-
nologized Asiatic bodies and spaces but also of conditional visibility, or the
ways in which certain bodies, objects, and images are sometimes visible
and other times invisible in the dominant culture. As I discuss in more detail
later, conditional visibility defines how the Asiatic appears in U.S. commer-
cial media and how people of Asian descent are seen—and just as often not
seen—in the public sphere.
It is easy for Asian Americans to condemn images like those I just de-
scribed as racist stereotypes due to the feelings of anger, disgust, and shame
that may arise in us from seeing ourselves distorted in such images. It is also
easy to dismiss or dissemble them unconsciously as I did, perhaps to repress
those feelings or perhaps because we have grown so accustomed to accept-
ing these flattened racial metaphors as abstract others (i.e., not seeing
ourselves in them). On the complementary flip side, it is just as easy to cel-
ebrate openly—or to consume secretly with guilty pleasure—the recent
proliferation of “cool” Asian tropes that constitute the background and
increasingly the foreground of more contemporary Hollywood films such
as the Rush Hour series (1998, 2001, 2007), the Kill Bill dyad (2003, 2004),
and The Forbidden Kingdom (2008). The challenge lies in examining these
representations critically rather than denouncing them as simple stereo-
types unworthy of scholarly attention, automatically citing them as evidence
of the increasing presence (and implied power) of Asians and Asian Ameri-
cans in Hollywood, or reclaiming them as subversive tactics that Asian
INTRODUCTION • ix
American artists, critics, and audiences can use to resist the hegemonic
Hollywood system.
What ties together the seemingly opposed abject and fabulous depictions
of the Asiatic described earlier is the way fans and critics alike acknowledge
both for their style, not their content, and their surface, not their interiority.
In other words, both kinds of oriental imagery—the invisible abject and
the hypervisible fêted—are reduced to decorative flourishes within the films
in which they appear as well as in the popular discourse surrounding them.
“Oriental style” describes the process and product of this reduction: the
ways in which Hollywood films crystallize and commodify multiple, hetero-
geneous Asiatic cultures, histories, and aesthetics into a small number of
easily recognizable, often interchangeable tropes that help to shape domi-
nant cultural attitudes about Asia and people of Asian descent.
Yellow Future provides a genealogy of this style and its many variations
through close, contextualized readings of films in which it appears, from
Blade Runner (1982), The Karate Kid (1984), and Gung Ho (1986) to Rush
Hour, The Matrix (1999), and Batman Begins (2005). These readings analyze
“oriental style” as part of the ongoing historical process of the racialization
of East Asians in the United States (“oriental”) and as an aesthetic product
that appeals to multiple audiences due precisely to its seeming lack of depth,
subjectivity, and history (“style”). By explicating the relationship between
process or context and product or text, I try to show the ways in which
oriental style matters culturally, particularly in its reflection and shaping of
American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.
In developing my argument I have been indebted to the work that has
been done on film and media in Asian American studies, particularly by
Peter Feng, Darrell Hamamoto, L. S. Kim, Russell Leong, Gina Marchetti,
Kent Ono, Eugene Franklin Wong, Glen Mimura, Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Jun Xing, and others. Most of this work has focused on representations of
East Asian and Asian American characters, on settings and performances in
Hollywood films that foreground oriental themes and tropes, or on experi-
mental and feature films, documentaries, and video that were made by, and
usually for, Asian Americans. As of yet, no book-length study has appeared
that looks closely at what I am calling oriental style: the sometimes unset-
tling and often quite illuminating ways in which Asian tropes and themes
x • INTRODUCTION
occupy the background of Hollywood movies and how these tropes and
themes implicitly structure the primary narratives and characters of these
films.
My approach derives from one of the foundational ideas of cultural
studies: namely, that style cannot be separated from content, just as aesthet-
ics cannot be separated from ideology. This is not to discount the power of
a good story, a tight beat, or an evocative photograph to touch, move, and
transform but rather to investigate how they do so and why certain cultural
trends, styles, and narratives resonate strongly in certain periods and places
for certain groups of people. Lawrence Grossberg calls a coherent, recurring
grouping of such resonances a “cultural formation,” which Thomas Foster
sums up as “a historical articulation of textual practices with ‘a variety of
other cultural, social, economic, historical and political practices’ [that]
cannot be reduced to ‘a body of texts’ but ‘has to be read as the articulation
of a number of discrete series of events, only some of which are discursive.’”1
The question that drives this book, then, is this: what factors led to the emer-
gence of oriental style as a cultural formation in the 1980s, its development
in the 1990s, and its incorporation into the dominant discourse of Holly-
wood cinema in the 2000s?
Yellow Future follows a historical trajectory, with each chapter build-
ing on previous responses to this question. However, this structure neither
assumes nor implies a teleological narrative. As mentioned earlier, at first
glance current Asian imagery in Hollywood seems to deviate from earlier,
more explicitly stereotypical depictions of East Asians and Asian Americans.
High-budget films such as The Last Samurai (2003) and Memoirs of a Geisha
(2005) beautifully showcase Asian landscapes and cultures (albeit from a
decidedly Hollywood perspective), while more and more Asian North Amer-
ican actors such as Lucy Liu, Ming Na, Sandra Oh, and Russell Wong grace
the big and small screens. The following pages will show further evidence
for this shift in the uncannily Asiatic look of cinematic cityscapes and the
appearance of a desirable Asiatic masculinity embodied in glamorous action
heroes played by stars such as Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun-Fat and per-
formed through martial arts, now de rigueur in Hollywood action sequences.
These signs seem to indicate that East Asia, once abject and rejected, has
become, or is very much in the process of becoming, attractive and even
celebrated in U.S. popular media.
INTRODUCTION • xi
Yet, as the following pages will also show, all of these references to the
Asiatic bear the traces of the uniquely orientalist forms of racism that have
structured Asian American histories and identities even as some represen-
tations, regardless of the time periods and the racial constraints in which
they have appeared, have moved beyond expected stereotypes.2 For instance,
Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe), the Japanese exchange student in Six-
teen Candles (1984), and Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), the Japanese American
mentor in The Karate Kid, are both marked “oriental” through their narra-
tive roles in these movies as well as by the deliberately self-orientalized per-
formances of the actors who play them. However, the former is reduced to
a stereotype, whereas the latter is a racialized type that becomes humanized,
a process I explore in chapter 3. In other words, although both characters
fall broadly under the category of Hollywood oriental stereotype, the differ-
ences in how the characters are developed within the narrative, or not, and
how this affects the other characters’—and implicitly viewers’—relationship
to the Asiatic suggest the need to look more carefully at how stereotypes are
deployed in Hollywood.
Along similar lines, an Asian actor’s top billing in a film does not at all
ensure that the film will not use racist stereotypes or that these stereotypes
will be diminished. In fact, as I show in my analyses of recent “Afro-Asian”
films in chapter 4, those stereotypes continue to be played to the hilt, often
for spectacular and comic effects. Produced and consumed with an ironic,
postmodern “wink,” such effects detach cultural signifiers of race, gender,
and sexuality from the often brutal histories of power and subordination
they have traditionally referenced. Played fast and loose on the big screen,
these ostensibly emptied signifiers relegate racism, sexism, and homophobia
to the past and, in the process, elide their present-day manifestations. Indeed,
the role of such stylized racial images in the larger cultural trend that Lisa
Nakamura calls “cosmetic multiculturalism”—a trend that characterizes the
casts and mise-en-scène of films by younger male American directors such
as Quentin Tarantino, Brett Ratner, Robert Rodrigeuz, and Justin Lin—epit-
omizes the complexities and contradictions of representing racial and ethnic
difference in contemporary Hollywood.3
The readings of racial imagery that comprise Yellow Future offer a pre-
liminary framework for investigating these contradictions by considering
oriental images and iconography as formal, creative conventions that draw on
xii • INTRODUCTION
and influence sociopolitical representations of East Asia and Asian America.

Using in-depth case studies of Blade Runner and The Matrix as critical flash-
points, I trace the development of an oriental style that has taken root most
deeply and flowered most visibly in Hollywood movies, but that has also
begun to permeate U.S. media and popular culture at large. Methodologi-
cally I perform what I argue—that is, that background is as important as
foreground—by using an interdisciplinary approach that juxtaposes close
readings of individual texts with “thick descriptions” of their various and
varied contexts.
Chapter 1 provides the theoretical framework for the book, locating the
notion of oriental style within contemporary critical discourse on Oriental-
ism, technology, and multiculturalism. I revisit the models of Orientalism
and techno-orientalism introduced respectively by Edward Said in literary
and postcolonial studies and by David Morley and Kevin Robins in media
studies and extended by Lisa Nakamura and Wendy Chun in technocultural
studies. I go on to place these models in conversation with the works of cul-
tural theorists such as Etienne Balibar, Homi Bhabha, bell hooks, and Stuart
Hall, which focus on the sociopolitical impact of representations of racial
difference in popular culture.
Chapter 2 opens with a fairly recent example of oriental style in Batman
Begins, then historically grounds its materialization within the emergence
of the New Hollywood from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s and concur-
rent shifts in American Orientalism. Centering on the relationship between
Pacific Rim discourse and post-1965 Asian immigration, I introduce the
concepts of racial triangulation and the model minority from Asian Ameri-
can studies. These concepts play a pivotal role in the film analyses that follow
in subsequent chapters, beginning with the science-fiction cult classic Blade
Runner.
In chapter 3 I perform a close reading of this film, illuminating the ways
in which Asiatic imagery appears as an unsettling backdrop that ambiva-
lently reflects and responds to national anxieties about the rising economic
power of Japan abroad and the increasing number of Asian immigrants
at home. I discuss how in Blade Runner oriental style assumes the spec-
tral form of a techno-oriental other that is displaced onto the spaces of the
dystopic, futuristic American city and projected through the bodies of sec-
ondary Asiatic characters.
INTRODUCTION • xiii
Chapter 4 traces the movement of this techno-oriental other from the

background to the foreground in three biracial buddy films of the 1980s: The
Karate Kid, Gung Ho, and Black Rain (1989). Weaving together a number of
theoretical threads on race and masculinity from African American and
Asian American studies, I show the complex ways in which the central rela-
tionships between white male characters and their Asiatic friends and neme-
ses orientalize the former, destabilizing their whiteness and masculinity and
subsequently blurring the boundaries between East and West, self and other.
Chapter 5 moves on to the 1990s, when Asia entered an economic reces-
sion after Japan’s bubble economy burst and Great Britain handed Hong Kong
over to the People’s Republic of China. At the same time, Hong Kong action
and martial arts movies and anime (Japanese animation) entered main-
stream media culture in the United States. I give a brief historical overview
of the American reception of these Asian popular media, then consider how
their orientalized (mis)translations fuse with representations of black style
in hip-hop kung fu films such as Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2, Cradle 2 the
Grave (2003), Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999, hereafter Ghost Dog),
and the Kill Bill movies.
Finally, chapter 6 looks back to The Matrix, the sleeper cyberpunk hit
that introduced this particular form of Afro-Asian imagery and sensibility
to mass audiences. In my close reading of this film I focus on the racializa-
tion and masculinization of the passing, mixed-race protagonist played by
hapa actor Keanu Reeves and end by discussing the ways in which two key
elements of oriental style—techno-orientalism and popular multicultural-
ism—culminate in the film’s metaphoric representations of the Asiatic.
Like Brazil, The Matrix presents a depressing picture of the future in which
technology plays a major role in turning people into machines—this time,
quite actively and literally. However, the racial difference suggested by the
“oriental” robot and dwarves in the dream scenes of an otherwise all-white
British world have been replaced by a multiracial crew boasting mad mar-
tial arts skills: an African American mentor, a tough white woman, and a
computer-obsessed, mixed-race hero. This hero passes for All-American as
well as white thanks to Reeves’s unforgettable early portrayal of one of two
clueless California high school students traveling through time to learn world
history. Similarly, The Matrix passes as a celebration of the once marginal,
xiv • INTRODUCTION
now stylishly visible elements of multicultural America. In a turn that sug-

gests we have come very far with respect to representing difference in the
dominant U.S. culture, we are supposed to identify with these elements and
cheer for them against the global threat of an alien enemy technology.
Tellingly, this enemy, which has enslaved all of humanity (most of whose
members are nonwhite, as revealed in the sequels), takes the form of expres-
sionless white men in suits called sentinels. Furthermore, in an interesting
twist, these sentinels are led by an Australian actor, Hugo Weaving, who
was best known in the United States at the time for his role as a drag queen
in the successful crossover film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert and as the voice of Rex the dog in Babe. Much like Weaving and
Reeves—Australian and Canadian actors, respectively, who pass splendidly
as Anglo-American characters—the film, a product of transnational creative
and financial collaboration, passes as Hollywood. Indeed, it is Hollywood. As
many film historians have pointed out, the assimilation of nonwhite and
non-American filmmakers, writers, cinematographers, financiers and dis-
tributors, actors and actresses into the melting pot of American film has
been and continues to be a defining element of this necessarily transnational
national cinema. Most fans know that The Matrix was shot in Sydney and
Chicago, choreographed by Hong Kong film veteran Yuen Wo Ping, directed
by American brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and coproduced by Warner
Brothers and Village Roadshow Pictures, a subsidiary of the Australian dis-
tribution company Village Roadshow.
As much as the oriental imagery in Brazil, a British film shot by an Amer-
ican expatriate, initially eluded me, that of The Matrix stands out in my
memory, and not simply for its innovative combining of Eastern elements
such as wire-fu, manga and anime styles, and Chinese philosophies with
Western ones such as Hollywood three-act structure and poststructural-
ism—all of which I discuss in more detail in chapter 6. The imagery stands
out because I first saw it on the big screen in Seoul, South Korea, where I was
born, with my father. It was the last film we saw together. I was mesmerized.
He was confused and could not follow the plot. Earlier that week we had
visited the spot where his primary school had once been. I remember his
nostalgia for a city that had changed almost completely during his lifetime,
from a war-torn Third World nation to the most wired country on the planet.
Leaving the theater in crowded Shinchon, surrounded by a sea of unsmiling
INTRODUCTION • xv
Koreans, I had the eerie feeling that I was still in The Matrix; I was the
authentic human being lost in a fake, technologized world: a Korean Amer-
ican ironically trying to pass as Korean in Korea.
Though I was perhaps unconscious of it at the time, the seeds for this
study were planted at that moment. I wondered how the difference in me
that was Asian, which had been so shameful in 1980s America, had become
the template for such a slick, hip Hollywood vision of the future. What
follows is the story of how this particular vision has become so common-
place in such a short time in the United States—and some thoughts on why
we should care.
1
Style, Visibility, Future
If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white

women should be running Western culture.
—Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
Yellow Future builds upon and contributes to ongoing conversations in eth-

nic studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies around Oriental-
ism, technology, and multiculturalism. In the following pages I show how a
critical examination of “oriental style” can bring some of these conversa-
tions together. I end by focusing on the title of this book, meditating on how
future might be made to mean something other than the goal of a progres-
sive multicultural narrative or the “positive” representation of a marginal
group in the dominant culture. Such a narrative not only falsely equates vis-
ibility with power but also assumes that members of marginal groups always
and automatically would want to become part of that culture.
Rather than perpetuating this flawed logic by condemning oriental
images in Hollywood films for their marginality or celebrating them for
their emerging presence in the mainstream, I suggest instead that we look
closely and carefully at how oriental style is marginal and what kind of cul-
tural work it does in and at the margins. How does this style inhabit the
background of popular films? How does it reinforce and critique the ideolo-
gies they articulate with regard to gender, sexuality, class, and nation as well
as race and ethnicity? Finally, how does it gesture—awkwardly and some-
times poignantly—toward subjects, histories, and experiences that these
films cannot and will not recognize? By raising these questions I hope to
open up the possibility of imagining different kinds of futures and of imag-
ining our collective future differently.
1
2 • STYLE, VISIBILITY, FUTURE
Reworking Orientalism
In 1978 Edward Said coined the term “Orientalism” to describe a tendency

in the West to represent the Middle East as a fantastic, ahistorical space to be
occupied and to portray its peoples and cultures as objects to be consumed.
Said’s book Orientalism analyzes the ways in which such representations
place the East in a dependent role vis-à-vis the West, reinforcing the power
of the latter to speak about and for the former.
Although this power is grounded in the economic disparity between the
West and the so-called Rest that is the legacy of European imperialism, Said
stresses that it is maintained less directly through intertextual networks that
operate at the level of superstructure. Orientalism is thus “a distribution of
geopolitical awareness into literary, philological, and historical texts . . . a
discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with
political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven
exchange with various kinds of power.”1 Instead of confining this colonizing
discourse to a particular group of texts or fields, Said treats it as a set of
political and cultural strategies that contains and controls the Asiatic through
a double movement. Orientalism lumps the plethora of different ethnicities,
cultures, and nations that exist on and around the Asian continent into one
category: the Orient.2 At the same time, it fragments this seemingly mono-
lithic category into what Lisa Lowe has called “manageable parts,” often
interchangeable, which are deemed economically, politically, and culturally
useful, once again, for and by the West.3
The category of the Orient was produced in the period of the Enlighten-
ment, the same period to which Michel Foucault has traced the historical
origins of the “normalizing gaze” central to the colonization project.4 Accord-
ing to Foucault, the authoritative gaze of the dominant group (rendered as
subjects) normalizes and naturalizes marginal groups (rendered as objects)
in order to “know” and thus control them through that knowledge. The gaze
of the dominant group normalizes by placing members of marginal groups
within a teleological narrative of progress in which the goal is to become as
much like the de facto normal member of the dominant culture as possible.
At the same time, it naturalizes by containing these others within determin-
istic scientific laws that preclude them from achieving the goal of normal-
ity. The normalizing gaze thus has the effect of distancing the humanized
STYLE, VISIBILITY, FUTURE • 3
subject (figured as the mind) not only from the objectified other (figured as
the body) but also, crucially, from traits of the other within himself, a point
to which I will return in later sections.
Said draws parallels between the ways in which the normalizing gaze of
the West reduces the Middle East to a racialized object and women to sexu-
alized objects. In other words, Orientalism is gendered: the East is figured as
the eroticized, feminized other that exists to be known, penetrated, and sub-
ordinated by the masculinized West.5 A number of scholars in gender studies
have since complicated the analogy by revealing the slippery, often ambi-
guous nature of the power dynamics between self and other with respect to
the ways in which performances of gender and sexuality necessarily inform
and intersect with those of race, ethnicity, class, and nation.6 These studies
demonstrate that, like the erotic, Orientalism is infinitely nuanced in its
myriad articulations and seeming shifts of power, which nonetheless remain
grounded in the unequal relationship between one individual or group and
another.
In theorizing this paradox Said points out that the durability of Orien-
talism derives precisely from its productiveness. As he clearly states, “My
whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and the
durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that
their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not
unilaterally inhibiting.”7 Said’s central project in Orientalism, then, was to
look at how the ideological forces underlying this particular discourse man-
age to reproduce themselves horizontally across a wide range of genres and
media and vertically from one period to another.
I take up Said’s project in Yellow Future, extending the questions Said
raised along three different axes. First, I analyze popular visual media, spe-
cifically contemporary commercial movies, rather than the canonical liter-
ary, historical, and philological texts that constituted the objects of Said’s
study. Second, I consider the sociopolitical context of the United States in
the so-called Era of Globalization rather than those of Britain and France in
the Age of Empire. Finally, I look at representations of East Asia—predom-
inantly China and Japan—rather than those of the Middle East. To these
various axes I apply Said’s ideas as well as those of other scholars who have
used his work to discuss East Asian Orientalism within the context of U.S.
history and culture.8
Orientalism was groundbreaking in many ways—not least for inaugurat-

ing the field of postcolonial studies. However, its emphasis on European per-
ceptions of the Middle East cannot wholly account for the distinct develop-
ment of American Orientalism, as Said is quick to note at the beginning of
his study.9 Shaped for the most part by U.S. military conflicts in Asia and by
the history of Asian immigrants in the United States, American Oriental-
ism constitutes the starting point for Asian American cultural studies, which
expands Said’s paradigm by considering how various kinds of racism have
impacted and continue to impact the construction of Asiatic communities
in the United States.
Until recently, most work in the field has tended to focus on representa-
tions of Asian Americans as seen through the lens of American history and
culture. This makes sense because one of the primary purposes of the Asian
American movement of the 1970s was to empower Asian Americans against
institutionalized racism. The most strategic and politically expedient way to
work toward this goal was to establish that Asian Americans were indeed
American and therefore entitled to the benefits of legal and cultural citizen-
ship due all Americans.
I also take an Americanist approach, not for this explicitly political rea-
son but because such an approach is the most conducive to analyzing rep-
resentations of difference in Hollywood movies, which reflect, produce, and
disseminate dominant national ideologies. A close look at oriental style,
however, reveals the significant ways in which not only Hollywood but also
Asian America has always already been transnational—a point that David
Palumbo Liu elegantly performs when he rewrites “Asian-American” as
“Asian/American.” The slash or solidus represents a refusal to define Asian
American identities in a way that assumes that “American” is the default
white national subject while the ethnic marker “Asian” is its supplemental
modifier. Palumbo-Liu deploys the solidus to posit “a choice between two
terms” wherein the construction “Asian/American” “at once implies both ex-
clusion and inclusion . . . mark[ing] both the distinction installed between
‘Asian’ and ‘American’ and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.”10
This movement refers to two related elements that define the social and
political identity of Asian Americans. The first, which I will flesh out later,
is the historically ambiguous racial status of Asiatic people in the United
States as unreadable nonwhites. Neither black (of African descent) nor white
(of European descent), Asian Americans are seen as outside or vacillat-

ing between the two poles of the so-called black/white binary, which has
been the dominant framework for understanding race relations in the
United States. Subsequently, Asian Americans have been rendered perpetu-
ally foreign, invisible, and suspect. The second element is the increasingly
explicit transnationalization of “Asian America” in the past twenty years
as immigration patterns have shifted and as national borders have grown
ever more fluid and cultural differences ever more hybrid thanks to the
increasing availability of new media, communications, and transportation
technologies.
In its yoking of the Asiatic with technological imagery, oriental style
seems to reflect the diminishing relevance not only of the nation-state but
also of the East/West binary of Orientalism in a world gone global through
shared media production and consumption. The current position of Holly-
wood exemplifies these shifts. Even as Hollywood products continue to
dominate the world economically, movies and other popular media from
Asia have begun to gain international currency and to influence filmmak-
ing styles, trends, and content in Hollywood as well as other national film
industries around the world. The growing visibility, accessibility, and popu-
larity of Japanese anime, Hindi film musicals, Hong Kong action flicks,
and the Korean Wave or Hallyu reflect the economic development of partic-
ular Asian countries in the past thirty years as well as the willingness on
the part of their governments and corporations to invest in the production,
marketing, and distribution of domestic films targeted toward international
markets.
Meanwhile, in conjunction with the rapid ascent of the newly industri-
alized countries (NICs) (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea)
to First World status and their efforts to become global cultural players, a
new kind of transnational subject has appeared on the world stage. Accord-
ing to Aiwa Ong, this subject, exemplified by the Hong Kong diasporic elite,
plays by and through the rules of an international neoliberal game of iden-
tity politics in which “the market is absolutely transcendental” and, in so
doing, introduces a new kind of “flexible citizenship . . . [that] respond[s]
fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions.”11
These cosmopolitan transnational citizens of Ong’s study as well as less afflu-
ent members of non-Western immigrant communities are forging new kinds
of virtual relationships to their homelands and adopted homes through the

production and consumption of ethnic movies, television shows, popular
music, and web sites.12
Yellow Future looks not at these relationships but instead, on the other
end of the spectrum, at the production practices that translate and transform
non-Western cultural forms into palatable commodities for Western (and
Westernized) audiences. Like studies on ethnic and diasporic media, how-
ever, it is concerned with how human agency—specifically creative agency—
simultaneously shapes and is shaped by larger processes of globalization.
How are the dynamics of Orientalism changing in the early twenty-first cen-
tury as the cybernetic “global village” of transnational capitalism meets the
print- and nation-based “imagined community” of industrial capitalism?13
This question is central to the book, and I respond to it in various ways
in the following chapters. What ties these responses together is the concept
of techno-orientalism or high-tech Orientalism, which provides a starting
point for examining how and why East Asia has become so closely linked
with technology.
Techno-orientalism
David Morley and Kevin Robins coined the term “techno-orientalism” to

describe a prevalent form of anti-Japanese and anti–East Asian racism that
appeared in the 1980s, when Japan’s bubble economy was at its peak.14
According to Morley and Robins, increasingly ambivalent attitudes toward
new technologies such as personal computers, Walkmans, and video games
became connected with previous stereotypes of East Asians based on the
notion of the yellow peril, a fear of Asiatics taking over Western civilization
dating back to Genghis Khan’s invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century.
William Wu elaborates on the yellow peril thus:
The fear of this threat focuses on specific issues, including possible

military invasion from Asia, perceived competition to the white
labor force from Asian workers, the alleged moral degeneracy of
Asian people, and the potential genetic mixing of Anglo-Saxons
with Asians, who were considered a biologically inferior race by
some intellectuals of the nineteenth century.15
Richard Thompson traces the modern version of the yellow peril to a paint-
ing of Asiatic hordes destroying various signifiers of Western civilization
that Kaiser William II commissioned in 1895, prints of which he sent as
gifts to other members of European royalty along with President William
McKinley. Around this time Social Darwinism, Malthusian population
studies, anxieties around the sustainability of imperialism, and social panics
around Chinese immigration were coalescing in the United States to pro-
duce an American version of the yellow peril. Public intellectuals in the
United States, England, and Australia such as Brooks Adams, Charles Pear-
son, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard hypothesized that, given limited
natural resources, population growth in Asian countries, and the “natural”
inclinations for the “primitive” (read non-Western) races to dominate the
more recessive, “superior” Nordic race, an unchecked Asia could initiate a
world war that would pit people of color against Anglo-Saxons.16
This yellow peril narrative appeared at critical junctures in the twentieth
century when the West came into military contact with East and Southeast
Asia, including the Russo-Japanese War (1905), the Philippine-American
War (1899–1913), World War II (1939–45), the Korean War (1950–53), and
the Vietnam War (1959–75). Although the narrative was deployed differ-
ently to fit the social and political contexts of the periods in which the
conflicts occurred and to some extent the cultural specificities of the Asian
nation with which the United States was involved, in each case racist assump-
tions based on the orientalist binary strongly shaped common perceptions
of people from that nation as well as those of other Asian nations. Fur-
thermore, the formula of the East as a threatening other to the West—an
oriental other that needs to be contained, controlled, and domesticated—
continues to be repeated, like so many variations on a tiresome theme, in
U.S. encounters with East and Southeast Asia as well as Western Asia or the
Middle East highlighted most recently in the second Iraq war and the global
war on terrorism.
In the 1980s the oriental other was Japan, and the threat it posed to the
United States was economic rather than military, although this economic
threat was often represented in and through martial terms. Morley and
Robins observe that at that time news and popular media began to depict
Tokyo as the quintessential postmodern metropolis while reactivating World
War II stereotypes of the Japanese as less human and more machinelike.
Linked with new technologies, Japan, and to a lesser extent the NICs, grew
to represent the notion of futurity in the national imaginary.
Techno-orientalism is based on the idea that the West resents the East
for its ability to appropriate and improve on Western technology—to beat
the West at its own game. Seen as nonwhite appropriators of Western tech-
nology, the Japanese become imbued with character traits historically con-
nected with Anglo-Saxon peoples and nations (the British in the nineteenth
century and the Americans in the twentieth), including those of rational-
ity, development, and progress, reflecting the West’s unconscious hatred
for these traits of modernity within itself. Japan’s success at producing
and manipulating technology thus destabilizes the rational foundations of
modern Western culture by revealing its power—a power grounded in tech-
nological prowess—to be culturally and racially transferable.17
This fear of a non-Western culture assuming elements of modernity
was demonstrated historically in the strong antagonism of the West toward
Japan when it defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and emerged as a
formidable nonwhite Axis power during World War II. According to Morley
and Robins, this antagonism was aimed at the seemingly subversive role of
the Japanese as both products and reproducers of Western education and
military technology.18 Similarly, fears of Japan in the 1980s stemmed from
its economic success, which was based on the production and trade of new
consumer technologies and reached a climax in the late 1980s and early
1990s when Japanese corporations began to buy out important symbols of
American culture. At the same time, Japan led research in robotics and cyber-
netics, high technologies that, in their reproduction of human mental and
physiological capabilities, most directly challenged the post-Enlightenment
notion of human beings as unique and autonomous subjects.19
Through their possession of economic capital, the Japanese appeared
to be appropriating American culture while, through their expert manipu-
lation of technology, also questioning what it meant to be human. The com-
bination resulted in new stereotypes of the Japanese as dangerous agents
of a new economic and technological yellow peril that threatened to destroy
the authenticity and legitimacy of American culture. These stereotypes were
often extended to other East Asian groups and expressed through techno-
oriental imagery in popular culture.
The Cyberpunk Future
Such techno-oriental imagery was most strikingly present in the near-future

settings of cyberpunk narratives, which emerged in the 1980s and spanned
a wide variety of media. Examples include Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and
Max Headroom, as well as countless music videos with Asiatic themes and
tropes such as those for David Bowie’s “China Girl” and the Vapors’ “Turn-
ing Japanese.”
In The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory, Thomas
Foster provides a genealogy of cyberpunk as a subgenre of hard science fic-
tion that surfaced in the early 1980s and has since become naturalized as a
cultural formation.20 Pam Rosenthal’s description of cyberpunk narratives in
the early 1990s as “shockingly recognizable . . . our world, gotten worse, gotten
more uncomfortable, inhospitable, dangerous, and thrilling” still resonates, at
least in academic circles, perhaps because it so succinctly captures the post-
modern blurring of boundaries between diegetic and extradiegetic spaces,
reality and fiction, present and future for which these narratives have come
to be known.21 This blurring is epitomized in the commonly held notion
that William Gibson predicted the emergence of Internet culture with his
fictional description of cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination” in 1984.22
Although Gibson did not coin the term cyberpunk—it originally appeared
in a short story by Bruce Bethke titled “Cyberpunk,” written in 1983—his
first novel, published a year later, certainly helped to popularize it.23 Cyber-
punk soon grew into a literary movement of young, mostly white male
authors writing about young, mostly white male hackers having virtual ad-
ventures in a dystopic near future dominated by computers and corpora-
tions. In this future, human beings are emotionally alienated due to the
mechanization of social relations brought on by postindustrial capitalism.
The cyberpunk hero tries to successfully navigate the global network of
information that the world has become without losing his (or, more rarely,
her) fundamental sense of self. It is no surprise, then, that cyberpunk stories
tend to center thematically on what makes human beings “human,” interro-
gating how we differ from advanced forms of artificial intelligence; how we
distinguish “real” objects, places, and experiences from their copies; and how
traditional ontological categories break down in a society ruled by technol-
ogy and corporate interests.
In the preface to Mirrorshades, one of the first anthologies of cyberpunk

fiction, Bruce Sterling, a prominent engineer of the movement, defines the
subgenre as a mixture of science-fiction literary traditions, 1970s punk sen-
sibility, and 1980s pop culture:
The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not

only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly
science-fictional world. . . . Thus, “cyberpunk” . . . captures
something crucial . . . to the decade as a whole: a new kind of
integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate:
the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.24
According to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., it was precisely these allusions to

and imitation of media in cyberpunk fiction that led to its demise as a liter-
ary movement. As he wryly put it in the 1990s, “[An] interesting question is
exactly what cyberpunk literature can offer that video games, hip-hop, and
Rejection Front rock cannot.”25 The answer, apparently, was not much more.
Yet the same tendencies that made cyberpunk fiction an untenable paradox
within a decade of its inception gave its style a natural home in the increas-
ingly high-tech aesthetics and technology-oriented themes of visual media,
from music videos and performance art to comics, television, movies, and
the Internet.
What until recently have gone largely ignored in academic criticism are
the ways in which this technophilic style—defined by a global popular mul-
ticulturalism and permeated by Asiatic tropes—exoticizes non-Western
peoples and cultures. Lisa Nakamura and Wendy Chun, among others, have
started to fill this gap with discussions of techno-orientalism in cyberpunk
within larger studies of race, gender, and power on the Internet.26 It is to
these discussions that I now turn.
The High-Tech Orient in Cyberpunk and Cyberspace
In Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Chun
draws a parallel between the virtual landscapes of cyberspace and those of
the imagined Orient, arguing that the “high-tech Orientalism” of Neuro-
mancer, “like its nontech version, ‘defines the Orient as that which can never
be a subject.’”27 Chun describes cyberspace as a distinctly oriental space

teeming with Asian trademarks and corporations that exist to be “accessed”
by the novel’s protagonist, Case, the prototype for the Anglo-American
“console cowboy” of subsequent cyberpunk fiction and film.
Chun goes on to note that in its simulation of Japan in the Edo period,
the cyberpunk future depicted in Neuromancer reactivates the historical
moment at which Japan and the United States came into contact, aligning
the white male protagonist with the nineteenth-century “imperial subject”
whose mission was to “open” Japan to the West. Like the imperialist, Case’s
power comes from “see[ing] without being seen” as he assumes Foucault’s
normalizing gaze to conquer and control cyberspace, figured as the virtual
Orient.28 According to Chun, this “high-tech Orientalism” literalizes the
inherent virtuality of Orientalism as a Western fantasy of Asia circulated in
and through texts.
Taking Chun’s argument further, I would suggest that in the process
techno-orientalism also changes certain aspects of Orientalism and that
these changes are reflected in a couple of significant differences between the
“imperialist subject” and the “console cowboy.” To start, the latter diverges
from the former in the extent of his dependence on the Asiatic, specifically
the aid of Japanese technology and nonwhite characters. His strong need for
these tools (and for people as tools) to express and fulfill his desire for cyber-
space effectively destabilizes his subject position.
Let me illustrate what I mean by pointing out what may seem fairly obvi-
ous: before Case can use Asiatic technology, he must make it part of his own
body. In other words, he must put on this technology. Following Chun, the
console cowboy puts on aspects of the other when he incorporates technolog-
ical tools and skills associated with the Asiatic as a kind of prosthetic phallus
to penetrate cyberspace. Yet putting on this techno-oriental phallus requires
him to touch these tools, not simply look at them. Cyberpunk novels and
films also represent hackers navigating cyberspace in quite visceral ways,
emphasizing the rapid movement of the protagonist in and through archi-
tectural networks of information. Introducing touch and movement to the
dynamic between self and other brings the two dangerously closer, shorten-
ing the distance that vision maintains for an easy objectification of the other.
This physical proximity to Asiatic technology orientalizes the protago-
nist, who, as a way of dealing with having touched and been touched by this
technology, proceeds to put on a particular kind of masculinized perfor-

mance as the console cowboy. For despite his attempts to master and subdue
the other, he ultimately cannot control cyberspace. This is because he is
already part of cyberspace (that is, he is as much a tool of technology as the
tools he manipulates), and, more important, because he wants to be part of
it. Passages in Neuromancer describing Case’s physical and emotional need
for this “consensual hallucination” make it clear that he is addicted to the act
of “jacking in.”29
Our addictions control us; if we could control them, they would cease to
be addictions. The protagonist’s addiction to the pleasure he gets from inter-
acting with and in cyberspace—and the ways in which the novel romanticizes
this relationship—trouble the notion of a self-contained, self-controlled white
male subject who perceives the technologized Orient as his radical other.
Instead I would argue that the need and desire for this familiar other consti-
tute his identity as both a limited subject and a willing object of technology.
This brings us to the second point of difference between the orientalist
and the techno-orientalist. Whereas the latter strives to appear capable, mas-
terful, and virile—all traits associated with traditional forms of masculin-
ity—the former masochistically revels in his impotence. The old cowboy
demonstrates his ability to conquer both the frontier and the women through
whom he will literally reproduce heirs and metaphorically reproduce the
white nation. The console cowboy, meanwhile, plays a passive role in his re-
lationships with technically competent and sexually aggressive women and,
overall, comes off as pretty inept when he is not surfing the Internet.
Indeed this nerdy antihero might be said to be queer in the sense that
sex with women and its accompanying biological and cultural imperative
to reproduce, let alone to reproduce the white nation, simply does not turn
him on. What turns him on instead is technology, evidenced in the orgasmic
highs he experiences from penetrating cyberspace to access its information
with his techno-oriental phallus, which, once again, he must put on, belying
his original lack of a phallus. Chun describes this “‘nerd-cool’ form of mas-
culinity” in the following way: “High-tech Orientalism allows one to enjoy
anxieties about Western impotence. . . . This ecstasy does not obliterate the
impotence of the cowboy but rather allows him to live with it. It also re-
veals the limitations of such sexual fantasies and conquest, for this orgasmic
ecstasy constructs cyberspace . . . as a solipsistic space.”30
In her pioneering studies on representations of race and ethnicity in

online communities, Lisa Nakamura looks at how these fantasies from
cyberpunk fiction and film are “transcoded” onto the liminal spaces of the
Internet.31 Nakamura argues that stereotypes from these narratives strongly
influence how Internet users construct their virtual identities, particularly
with regard to racial passing and “identity tourism”—a term she has coined
to describe users’ performance of these fantasies online.32 Toward that end,
she devotes a chapter in each of her books to tracing the evolution of techno-
oriental imagery in popular cyberpunk texts from the 1980s to the 2000s.33
Like Chun, Nakamura sees the protagonist of early cyberpunk as an im-
perialist subject defining himself against and through technological others
who are racially coded Asian. She notes that this formula changed a bit in
post-1980s cyberpunk narratives such as the novel Snow Crash by Neale
Stephenson and the Matrix movies, which feature racially ambiguous pro-
tagonists and nonwhite primary characters. Yet according to Nakamura, the
increased visibility of racial difference in these second-generation texts still
reaffirms white male privilege by “depicting scenes of white and male users
experiencing ‘direct’ or immediate relations with computer interfaces, while
users of color are relegated to the background, depicted with truncated and
relatively distant . . . relationships to their hardware and software.”34
In other words, the power of the protagonist derives from his naturalized
connection to and manipulation of digital technologies, which inscribe him
as the mind over the body, different parts of which are projected onto the
nonwhite characters according to their particular racialized identities as well
as their more distanced relationships to these technologies. As in earlier
cyberpunk, Asia and Asian Americans are figured as orientalized space and
the instruments for accessing that space, whereas people of African descent
come to the foreground more in their role as primitive, fetishized bodies that
supply the emasculated white male subject with the sexual and cultural mojo
he lacks, a point to which I will return in the next section.35
In later chapters I draw quite a bit on the significant points that Chun
and Nakamura make in technocultural studies about representations of the
Asiatic in online spaces. However, by centering on the Hollywood films that
they examine peripherally and by using approaches from Asian American
studies, ethnic studies, and film and media studies, I build and expand upon
their conclusions through historically contextualized readings of similar
representations on the big screen. What my readings have in common with

their analyses of high-tech Orientalism on and about the Internet (besides
the obvious) is the persistence of race as a signifier for the real in popular cul-
tural narratives about technology and the virtual. As a number of techno-
cultural feminists have discussed, gender and sexual identities are performed
in incredibly queer and often subversive ways through, with, in, and as tech-
nology.36 In contrast, racial and ethnic identities, if performed at all in the
same spaces and with the same tools, are played straight and assumed to
refer to their “real” counterparts.
Why is this? And what might it have to do with the conditions of racial
production and consumption offscreen?
Keeping It Real
This tendency of popular media to represent race as real seems to contradict

the idea now commonplace in the academy (at least in the humanities) that
racial identities and affiliations, like those of gender and sexuality, are not
universal and biologically based but rather socially and culturally constructed.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant first articulated this idea in the 1980s
through their sociological concept of racial formation, which they define as
follows:
The meaning of race is defined and contested throughout society, in

both collective action and personal practice. In the process, racial
categories themselves are formed, transformed, destroyed and re-
formed. We use the term racial formation to refer to the process by
which social, economic and political forces determine the content
and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn
shaped by racial meanings.37
Omi and Winant point out that in the United States we think of race either as
“an essence . . . something fixed, concrete and objective” or as “a mere illusion,
which an ideal social order would eliminate,” with conservatives tending to
side with the former notion and liberals the latter.38 What both viewpoints fail
to apprehend is the crucial point of racial formation, which is that race is a
fiction that becomes real through its acceptance and reiteration by members
of both dominant and marginal groups. We experience this most deeply

at the level of the body or, more specifically, how we inhabit and move our
bodies in different spaces.
As Sara Ahmed notes in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects,
Others, “The ‘matter’ of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing
oneself or being seen as white or black or mixed does affect what one ‘can
do,’ or even where one can go, which can be redescribed in terms of what is
and is not within reach. . . . Race becomes . . . a question of what is within
reach, what is available to perceive and to do ‘things’ with.”39 Following
Ahmed, by “race” I mean two things: first, the perception of racial difference
based on one’s physiognomy and social behavior in certain contexts and sec-
ond, the attachment of particular cultural values to that perceived differ-
ence, which in turn strongly affects one’s life quality and chances. How, then,
are we taught to see, perform, and treat these differences as such? Put simply,
how do we learn to be racist?
According to Etienne Balibar, we learn to see race and to judge accord-
ingly through stereotypes or racial markers that indicate how various forms
of racism are deployed and internalized in different social, spatial, and his-
torical contexts. As he puts it,
Racism . . . organizes affects by conferring upon them a stereotyped

form, as regards both their “objects” and “subjects.” It is this
combination of practices, discourses and representations in a
network of affective stereotypes which enable us to give an account
of the formation of a racist community and also of the way in
which, as a mirror image, individuals and collectivities that are
prey to racism find themselves constrained to see themselves as a
community.40
Like Said, Balibar believes that tracing the formation, circulation, and evolu-
tion of stereotypes can reveal the ways in which racist discourses adopt new
rhetorical and epistemological models in order to perpetuate existing power
hierarchies. In other words, by denaturalizing stereotypes we can expose
and challenge the racist attitudes they promulgate.
Before attempting to make this effort, however, we need to understand
how stereotypes work to make the fiction of race real. Homi Bhabha defines
the stereotype as “a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates

between what is always ‘in place,’ already known and something that must
be anxiously repeated.”41 It is the ambivalence implicit in this vacillation that
accounts for the durability of the stereotype across space and time and that
gives racist discourse its uniquely elliptical and solipsistic qualities. More
specifically, what is repeated in the stereotype as the material object and
evidence of “common-sense” knowledge (Asians are smart, blacks are ath-
letic, women are bad drivers) is always in excess of what can be proven
empirically. Precisely for this reason, the knowledge must be repeated and,
through these never-ending repetitions, reified as an inherently unstable
form of truth.
According to Bhabha, stereotypes simplify a marginal group by present-
ing not a necessarily false image of that group but, just as cripplingly, a fixed
and arrested one.42 Specific decontextualized traits come to stand in for the
entire group, whose members subsequently come to be seen and understood
through those traits. This discussion of the stereotype should recall earlier
ones of Orientalism and techno-orientalism, particularly the role of the
normalizing gaze in fixing the other as a static object vis-à-vis the mobile
subject. For Bhabha, the stereotype functions as the material trace of the
cultural effort to maintain the subject-as-mind/object-as-body split enacted
by and through this gaze. Its reiterations sustain the myth of the racial other
as a fragmented nonhuman object that can be quantified and categorized
and that needs to be dominated and controlled.
Yet a deep, fundamental anxiety also underlies these reiterations because
there is always the potential for the racial other to return and resist the nor-
malizing white gaze. As Bhabha points out, “There is always the threatened
return of the look; in the identification of the Imaginary relation there is
always the alienating other (mirror) which crucially returns its image to the
subject; and in that form of substitution and fixation that is fetishism there
is always the trace of loss, absence.”43 In other words, if the fetish functions
as a substitute for the phallus, which in psychoanalytic discourse defines
one’s (implicitly male) subjectivity, the stereotype as racialized fetish func-
tions as a substitute for the Western phallus or white (male) subjectivity. The
stereotype thus acts simultaneously as a temporary antidote to and constant
reminder of “the trace of loss” that impels the white subject to render his or
her nonwhite counterpart an other in the first place—that is, either a radical
other that needs to be eradicated (xenophobia) or a proximate other that

can be assimilated (fetishization).
Richard Dyer further explores this sense of absence in his wonderfully
nuanced study of whiteness in visual culture. According to Dyer, lack of
color, “itself a characteristic of life and presence,” is central to the construc-
tion of modern white identity as socially privileged yet spiritually impover-
ished.44 He describes this lack in the following way: “Whiteness as a race
resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by being
unseen. . . . True whiteness resides in the non-corporeal. . . . White is both
a colour and, at once, not a colour and the sign of that which is colour-
less because it cannot be seen: the soul, the mind, and also emptiness, non-
existence and death.”45 Dyer elaborates on the analogy of whiteness to death
in the last chapter of White, troubling the mind/body split with the follow-
ing conundrum: “To be positioned as an overseeing subject without [bodily]
properties may lead one to wonder if one is a subject at all. If it is spirit not
body that makes a person white, then where does this leave the white body
which is the vehicle for the reproduction of whiteness, of white power and
possession, here on earth?”46
It is precisely this anxiety over a materially and culturally privileged
white personhood based on the subject’s distance from the body that keeps
race real on the big, small, and terminal screens. More specifically, nonwhite
people and their cultures come to represent the body—and traits associated
with the body such as sexuality, sensuality, connection, and community—
that white people need and desire but must disavow in order to maintain
their identities, experiences, and histories as central, universal, and superior.
Such anxiety is intensified in cyberpunk narratives in which proximity
to technology gives the white male subject a certain kind of virtual power
but distances him even further from his “real” biological body and, indeed,
poses the threat of losing that body (read: humanity) altogether to tech-
nology, which historically has been gendered female and more recently
raced Asiatic.47 Thomas Foster’s close readings of Robocop (1987) and Billy
Idol’s performance in the music video for “Shock to the System” show how
white men began to be represented as fragmented and decentered and thus
traumatized in the 1980s when the discourses of cybernetics and multicul-
turalism both became incorporated in the dominant culture. According to
Foster, the protagonists played by Peter Weller and Idol, respectively, try to
disassociate from the racist history of the United States in which they are
implicated but can do so only by assuming a victim position that appropri-
ates and elides the suffering associated with black men at the hands of the
white supremacist state.48
Likewise, Nakamura notes that black masculinity provides the white
male with the coolness he needs to distinguish himself from the mechan-
ized white agents in the Matrix movies even as black supporting charac-
ters “supply the marginal blackness . . . against which whiteness stands
in sharp relief.”49 The notion of “black cool” to which Nakamura refers is
based on a certain romanticization of black people as the ultimate victims
and survivors of white racism. This romanticization, in turn, is based on the
dominant model of race relations in the United States, which foregrounds
blackness as the racial other and whiteness as the default norm, with other
nonwhite groups such as American Indians, Latino/as, Asian Americans, and
mixed-race Americans either rendered invisible or pushed to one end of the
racial spectrum.
How are these groups represented racially vis-à-vis the black/white
binary? What kinds of racial hierarchies exist within and across these differ-
ent representations? And why is it important to look at these differences
comparatively?
Different Differences
This study is premised on the notion that critically interrogating oriental

style in Hollywood can provide valuable insight into the widespread fasci-
nation not only with East Asian bodies and cultures but also with racial and
ethnic difference more generally. Tracing the development of this particular
Asiatic style thus entails comparing it to how other nonwhite groups have
been perceived and represented in the dominant culture as well as how
members of those groups have understood themselves in relation to Asians
and Asian Americans and vice versa.
By engaging in this kind of comparative racial analysis I join scholars in
ethnic studies such as Gary Okihiro, Vijay Prashad, Bill Mullen, and others
whose work compares the histories, cultural representations, and political
engagement of and among different racial groups in the United States.
These studies demonstrate the ways in which power flows multilaterally,
hegemonic ideas are internalized and reproduced within and across mar-
ginal groups, and all groups are complicit in varying degrees with the
dominant culture.50 At the same time, a comparative critical lens reveals
historical, cultural, and political connections among marginal groups in
their struggles to “dismantle the master’s house” and to envision more equi-
table, inclusive structures for recognizing difference.51 Furthermore, it dis-
lodges whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity from the central position
these identity categories have occupied legally, socially, and culturally as the
standards for humanity and subjectivity in the West.
Likewise, I show the ways in which Asiatic imagery in contemporary
Hollywood is forged against and alongside not only whiteness—itself hardly
a stable or monolithic racial category—but also racial and cultural identities
and experiences other than those of whites. I do this, for instance, by extend-
ing the model minority paradigm to members of other nonwhite groups
based on their class position, interrogating Afro-Asian collaboration and
Afro-Orientalism in contemporary action films and discussing the role of
mixed-race and multicultural imagery within oriental style. In the process
I start to articulate the complex and often quite contradictory ways we
imagine, embody, and perform our racialized identities and relationships,
highlighting the deep ambivalence with which we identify both against and
through those we consider different from ourselves.
By looking at how East Asian difference is consumed as a curiously de-
racialized yet still orientalized metaphor, I also join a larger academic dis-
cussion around the commodification of racial and ethnic difference. Key
questions in this discussion include the following: What kinds of ideologi-
cal forces drive these modes of consumption through which members of
the dominant culture feel they can safely acknowledge and incorporate the
racial other? How does this phenomenon materially and psychically affect
people of color—those being consumed—as well as the white people who
presumably do most of the consuming? Finally, at what moments and under
what conditions does this binary of white consumer subject/nonwhite con-
sumed object start to unravel and morph into other kinds of power struc-
tures and relationships?
Cultural theorists working across a number of disciplines, including lit-
erature, art, anthropology, and film, as well as a number of Asian American-
ists whose work I engage in the following pages have traced the presence
of non-Western influences in the dominant cultures of Europe and the

United States.52 All of these scholars analyze how various nonwhite peoples
and their cultures—reduced to aesthetic abstractions in the Western imagi-
nary—have simultaneously framed and permeated, destabilized and pro-
duced particular constructions of the Western subject.
Perhaps the most influential essay on the topic of consuming racial dif-
ference in the United States is bell hooks’s “Eating the Other,” wherein
hooks argues that the “commodification of Otherness has been so successful
because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than
normal ways of doing and feeling.”53 She equates nonwhite ethnicity in
the United States to “spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that
is mainstream white culture,” and in doing so points out the transparent
power of whiteness as the racial norm.54 In making these assertions hooks
draws on two popular metaphors for the American nation: the melting pot
and the salad bowl.
The first analogy originated during the first wave of mass immigration
from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century and advocated a process of
cultural and racial assimilation wherein the immigrant willingly renounced
his or her Old World roots to become simultaneously American and white.
The second reflects the racial demographic shifts facilitated by mass immi-
gration from Asia and Latin America following the passage of the 1965
Immigration and Naturalization Act and a new kind of racial style politics
introduced by the black cultural movement, which tried to decolonize
the political consciousness of African Americans through the celebration of
black culture and aesthetics. Modeling themselves after the black cultural
movement, cultural nationalist movements within the Chicano/a, American
Indian, and Asian American communities soon developed their own forms
of racialized ethnic styles.55
Being white quickly became unpopular in the period of ethnic resur-
gence that followed, which conflated ethnicity with race in problematic
ways. Within the pluralistic framework promoted by this sudden national
interest in racial and ethnic difference, white and nonwhite ethnicities grew
to be seen as equivalent, a move that ironically depoliticized the struggles
of black and other nonwhite groups for political recognition in the white
supremacist system that had been implicitly promulgated by the melting-
pot notion of nation.
At the same time, the nonhyphenated, ahistorical white citizen cele-

brated in the melting-pot metaphor became a bland, colorless dish in need
of colorful ethnic spice. In other words, whites and nonwhites alike increas-
ingly came to see whiteness as a more general and problematic lack, not only
of physicality, sexuality, or spirituality but also, after the cultural nationalist
movements of the 1970s, of identity. Here whiteness—once the aspiration
of new Americans—was destabilized and dehistoricized at the same time
that identity was equated with the styles and (stereo)types of non-Western
peoples created by whites and nonwhites.
The observation of hooks that Anglo-Americans want to cast off the bur-
densome legacy of U.S. imperialism and racism and to deny their own racial
privilege comes out of this particular historical and cultural moment. Accord-
ing to hooks, white people celebrate and desire people of color because they
feel that the life/styles of their nonwhite counterparts are somehow more
real or authentic than their own. Consequently, nonwhite identities and
experiences gain cultural value as commodities in the marketplace through
the reductive terms of postindustrial capitalism and a white middle class
that sees itself as culturally bankrupt and lacking a legitimate history.56
In “New Ethnicities” Stuart Hall complicates this binary of resistance
versus consumption in his attempt to make sense of the increased visibility
of black bodies and the emergence of rich, multifaceted narratives about
black experience that were appearing in British popular culture during the
1990s. Hall notes that films such as Territories, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and
My Beautiful Laundrette highlight the multiple differences that constitute
black British identity with respect to gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.
And he goes on to argue that the nuanced and often ambiguous representa-
tions of blackness in these films question its construction as a homogenous
racial category defined primarily through and against whiteness. Hall calls
for new ways to analyze these representations that can go beyond positive/
negative image criticism:
You can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a

simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential
white subject, the new essentially good black subject. Now, that
formulation may seem to threaten the collapse of an entire political
world. Alternatively, it may be greeted with extraordinary relief at
the passing away of what at one time seemed to be a necessary

fiction. Namely, either that all black people are good or indeed that
all black people are the same.57
Ellis Hanson levels a similar critique in his terrific introduction to Out Takes:
Essays on Queer Theory and Film when he asks, “Why valorize verisimilitude
over fantasy in works of art? Why suppose that anyone would like homo-
sexuals more if they could see them the way they really are? Does the reality
of gay people’s lives necessarily make for good cinema? If someone made a
movie about my life, I doubt I would see it.”58 Hanson points out that the
representational approach to making and theorizing gay and lesbian cinema
often reproduces the very normative, static notions of gender and sexuality
that this approach purports to resist.
In its place Hanson suggests a queer approach to cinematic depictions
of difference to question the reified categories of difference that we have
internalized and are afraid to critique for fear of being called racists, sexists,
homophobes, or, even worse, sellouts. In this instance he defines queer not
only as “a rejection of the compulsory heterosexual code of masculine men
desiring feminine women . . . but also as . . . a resistance to normalization as
conceived more generally as a sort of divide-and-conquer mentality by which
cultural difference—racial, ethnic, sexual, socioeconomic—is pathologized
and atomized as disparate forms of deviance.”59 In an oblique way, I respond
to Hanson’s call in Yellow Future by queering not only the representational
strategies that have been used to imagine the Asiatic in U.S. cinema but also
the critical modes that have been used to analyze those strategies.
Drawing on hooks’s still relevant critique of racial exoticization and Hall
and Hanson’s important injunctions to look at the ambivalences and differ-
ences within representations of marginal groups, in the readings of the styl-
ized Orient in Hollywood that follow I have attempted to develop a nuanced
and multilayered theoretical approach with which to analyze the recent pro-
liferation of Asiatic images in U.S. popular media. Ideally such an approach
would complicate the easy critical move to see these images simply as orien-
talist stereotypes while continuing to take into account the often implicitly
racist frameworks in and through which they are produced.
This approach is difficult to implement because it must come to terms
with the idea that the marginality of a subordinate group is in some ways a
necessary condition for the representation of that group in the dominant

culture. This is, of course, historically the primary mode through which
Anglo-Americans have recognized nonwhites and through which nonwhites
have learned to recognize themselves, whether by unwittingly internalizing
those racialized constructions or stridently reclaiming them. The success
of social movements such as the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights move-
ments, all of which have drawn heavily on the “strategy of a simple set of
reversals” to represent historically oppressed social groups, demonstrates
the political necessity and efficacy of activating those constructions at cer-
tain moments and in certain contexts.
Yet as Hall points out, this model of normative visibility also reifies dif-
ferences across and within various groups, entrapping them in the zero-
sum game of identity politics that continues to define those in the margins
through the values and standards of those in the center and subsequently
reduces all people to static one-dimensional stereotypes. The same legal sys-
tem that recognizes particular kinds of identities and experiences as seen
by and through the perspective of the dominant group can neither account
for nor address the continuation of deeper socially and culturally embedded
modes of unconscious discrimination.60 Feelings of aversion, attraction,
and ambivalence toward those different from ourselves, which cannot be
explained or understood using positivist logic, reside not only in our indi-
vidual psyches but also in our local, national, and global cultures. These cul-
tures are shaped more and more by the mediated images and stories that we
consume together, for the most part uncritically.
The entertainment industry, of course, produces and disseminates many
of these images, which reflect and mold our mass fantasies through an inter-
related network of media. In feature-length films these fantasies are usually
communicated indirectly through spectacle and mise-en-scène rather than
directly through plot and dialogue. As Geoff King notes, these two forms of
narrative are implicitly connected in the driving force of Hollywood movies,
which is to draw the sustained attention (and disposable income) of as many
viewers/consumers as possible: “Profitability has usually been more impor-
tant than unity or homogeneity. The desire to appeal to a mass market is
likely to produce a degree of built-in incoherence and conflicting demands.
Spectacle is often just as much a core aspect of Hollywood cinema as coher-
ent narrative and should not necessarily be seen as a disruptive intrusion
from some place outside.”61 Yet the overriding tendency among film and
media scholars who examine the ideological dimensions of cinema has been
to privilege narrative over spectacle. That may be why the films discussed
in this scholarship are almost always explicitly about race, that is, they are
films that foreground the stories of nonwhite characters and usually contain
some kind of progressive political message condemning racism. I queer this
approach by looking at how racial difference structures the ideological mes-
sages of films that seem to have nothing to do with race. I do this by focusing
on the ways in which nonwhite bodies and cultures are rendered as specta-
cle in these predominantly white films—both as hypervisible performances
that rupture the narrative proper and as invisible alien presences that seem
to sustain it.
Much like covert forms of discrimination in the social world, subtle
forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia embedded in the backdrop of
popular-media narratives often are ignored or dismissed. The fact that these
messages have become so utterly normalized and naturalized—to the point
that they are even able to elude the relentless critical radar of academics—
would seem to demonstrate the incredible hold they have over us. In the
next and final section I discuss the power of this taken-for-granted presence
as it relates specifically to oriental style.
Yellow Future as Conditional Present
Yellow future obviously plays on the phrase yellow peril. The title of this
book thus recalls the violent legacy of racism and imperialism that grounds
Asian American history even as it alludes to more complicated forms of East
Asian exoticism that are becoming increasingly prominent as the term peril
is replaced with future.
Yellow future describes the mediated milieu in which people of Asian
descent find themselves in the United States, rendered white by default or
relegated to the background vis-à-vis not only white but also other non-
white groups. As highlighted in the coverage of events such as the 1992 Los
Angeles uprising, the 1999 Wen Ho Lee case, and the 2007 Virginia Tech
shootings, news media situate Asian Americans in the national imaginary as
perpetual foreigners at worst, honorary whites at best, and usually liminal
figures that lie somewhere between these two polarized roles.62
Tellingly, most references to East Asia on the big screen appear in a sim-
ilarly in-between space. Asiatic difference is sometimes hypervisible, as in the
martial arts sequences of action movies starring Steven Seagal, Claude Van
Damme, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li or the breathtaking landscapes and opulent
costumes of such period films as Empire of the Sun (1987), The Last Emperor
(1987), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, (2000). At other times it is
hardly visible at all, as in the bit role that Steve Park plays as the female pro-
tagonist’s awkward former classmate in Fargo (1996); the Shanghai cityscape
dotted with inscrutable Chinese faces, which amplifies the protagonist’s sense
of disorientation in Mission Impossible III (2006); or the consistently Asian
meals consumed with chopsticks in the apocalyptic near-future world of
Children of Men (2007).
In its invisibility and hypervisibility this imagery literally marginalizes
Asiatic peoples and cultures on the big screen, the effects of which we feel in
the sociopolitical realm. At the same time it underscores the conditional
presence of Asia and Asians in the United States as simultaneously foreign
and familiar. Indeed, oriental style encapsulates the curious paradox of the
domesticated other we think we know, the other we admire and love and
occasionally accept as one of our own; the other we do not realize that we
fear and perhaps even hate.
Oriental style does not refer to the static, abstracted representations of
East Asia as radical other to the West that we find in so much popular dis-
course as well as in seminal critical work by Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva,
and many other Western thinkers. Instead it refers to moving images on the
screen, which are visceral as well as visual. The imagery that interests me is
contained within the frame of the shot, but it also moves within that frame
and in so doing unsettles and changes it. In the moment of disruption opened
through that movement, we encounter the Asiatic not as pure, fixed exterior-
ity but instead as virtual space situated in an alternate time in which subjects
temporarily become objects and objects become subjects, where we suddenly
and unexpectedly meet the other and experience ourselves as othered.
“Yellow future” is this alternate space and time that oriental style opens
up. It is the critical space between visibility and invisibility, reality and poten-
tial that Teresa de Lauretis calls the “space-off” in Technologies of Gender:
Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. De Lauretis borrows the term from film
theory, where it is defined as “the space not visible in the frame but inferable
from what the frame makes visible,” and applies it to her discussion of how
we might acknowledge and construct feminist subjectivities that are not
defined by and through patriarchy.63
The space-off disrupts the binary of inside/outside, which situates
women either inside or outside patriarchy and the teleology of linear time
and places them on the progressive path toward gender equality, against and
away from what are presumed to be the sexist roles and attitudes of the past.
Rather than an actual space or time, de Lauretis theorizes the space-off as “a
movement from the space represented by/in a representation, by/in a dis-
course, by/in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied
(unseen) in them.”64 This movement occurs in and through “the spaces in
the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices
of institutions.”65 The “elsewhere” that de Lauretis describes, then, is not
located in “some mythic distant past or some utopian future history: it is
the elsewhere of discourse here and now, the blind spots, or the space-off, of
its representations.”66
For de Lauretis the space-off presents a way of imagining something new
by looking closely at what is in front of us and asking not just what is miss-
ing but what are we missing, what are we failing to see? When we really look,
what we find in the blind spots are neither reflective of a wholly injurious
past nor harbingers of a bright and certain future but instead moments of
possibility in the present that show the ways in which the past and the future
are always intertwined and under construction.
Along similar lines, Elspeth Probyn suggests using a new tense—the
conditional present or anterior future—to reconceptualize the self as con-
tinually changing and growing as it touches and is touched by others. In
“Technologizing the Self: A Future Anterior for Cultural Studies” she urges
academics who work on issues of power, identity, and representation “instead
of standing on our differences and wearing our identities as slogans . . . to
put the images of our selves to work epistemologically and ontologically.”67
In other words, Probyn advocates a transformative politics that starts with
an understanding of ourselves as works in process—flawed people with his-
torical baggage who can try to make the world a more equitable place by
learning from the past while living in the “as if ” of potential.68
The notions of the space-off and the conditional present are particularly
relevant to the project of Yellow Future because the future of its title is in so
many ways already here and has always been here. It lies in the traces of the
racisms that have shaped and continue to shape American history and iden-
tity. Yet, as I hope to show in the following pages, this future also points
toward ways in which we can acknowledge these traces and, by seeing and
working through them, move collectively toward imagining something new
and possibly different.
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tradesman; and it is from these two classes, whose social position is
much higher in America than it is here, that the greater part of their
teachers are drawn. They come from an educated class, and are
entitled by their antecedents, as well as by their office, to some
position, and they know how to assert it and maintain it. They have
no more timidity or mauvaise honte than their friends. They are full of
energy and ambition, and there is always animation in their teaching.
It is quite impossible for any country to have better material for
teachers than America has. And they appear to have an
inexhaustible supply of it. ‘Our half a million of teachers’ is not an
uncommon expression among them; but though this must pass for
an American figure of speech, still what it implies is true, that
whatever number of teachers may be required will always be
forthcoming. I once heard an American bachelor in this country
affirm that whenever he thought of marrying he should, other things
being equal, give the preference to a lady who had for some years
been a school-teacher. I do not know to what extent this sentiment is
shared by my friend’s countrymen, or whether the lady-teachers of
American schools are aware of the existence of this feeling in their
favour; but at all events it shows that the social position of teachers
is regarded as good.
Of course it is a mere truism to say that
American teachers would be more efficient if they Grading, an
had had more special training. But whatever their Improvement on
deficiency may be in this respect, the advantages I Classes.
have just spoken of as possessed by them are
very manifest; and as soon as you enter an American school (this
may be said generally of those in the North), you feel at once that
you are surrounded by quite a different atmosphere from anything
you are familiar with at home.
Another advantage their schools possess over ours is, that they
are what, in American school-phraseology, is called ‘graded.’ This,
unlike what I have just been mentioning, may be transplanted to our
side of the water. I need not now explain what grading means,
because I have spoken more than once of this method of arranging
and teaching schools. It ensures much more careful teaching than
our method, and that the whole of the school-time shall be devoted
to study. I know that there are some who have recently said that it
fails in individualising each case. I see, however, no force in this
remark, because I was struck with the degree to which the very
reverse of it resulted from the adoption of the method. It must be
compared with the only other alternative for schools—that of the
class system—and a little consideration will show that it is the class
system perfected; for it is simply the assigning of one class to one
person, and obliging that person to devote the whole of the school-
time, from the first to the last minute, to teaching that one class. It
prevents the scholars having any idle time while they are in school. It
necessitates a great deal of oral teaching. It concentrates the
teacher’s whole attention on one point, as well as on one class.
It does also very much cheapen the cost of education. But this is
not a benefit that will, among ourselves, be so understood and felt as
that there should be any desire to secure it, until we have rate-
supported schools. Our adoption of the rate to some extent, and in
some form or other, can only be a question of time, for it is the only
just method of supporting open schools; and the people will be
averse to the schools in which their children are educated bearing an
eleemosynary character. And when that day shall have come, then
the majority of the rate-payers here, just as in America, will be in
favour of the system, which, while it very much improves the
teaching, will at the same time very much diminish its cost, by
substituting where parishes are small one school for many.
Any remarks on American schools would be very incomplete if
nothing were said on the exclusion from them of all direct or
dogmatic religious teaching. The general rule is that a small portion,
sometimes limited to ten verses, of the Holy Scriptures should be
read daily, and that this should be followed by the Lord’s Prayer.
Some cities and districts allow more latitude for the prayer, a choice
of certain forms that are provided being permitted, or even an
extempore prayer founded on the Lord’s Prayer. In some schools
moral, as distinguished from religious or doctrinal teaching, may be
founded on the portion of Scripture that has been read. Christianity,
therefore, and the Bible are not ignored, as much being done as can
be done in schools that are supported equally by many Churches
differing from one another in their interpretation of the Bible. The
masters, however, do not in all cases avail themselves of the
opportunities allowed them for reading the Holy Scriptures and for
prayer. Among the laity there is spreading a feeling of disapprobation
at such omissions.
But what is the effect of this limitation of religious
teaching? It must be remembered that these are all Non-religious
day schools. The children are present in school not Irreligious.
only during school hours. They are under the
parental roof every night, at all their meals, and during the morning
and evening of each day. The teacher, therefore, is not in loco
parentis, as he is in the case of the child who boards and lodges with
him, and is entirely entrusted to his care. The parents still have
ample time and opportunities for all the religious instruction they
desire to give their children, and then there is the Sunday, the
Sunday-school, and the teaching of the ministers of religion. The
question, therefore, as far as the primary schools are concerned,
narrows itself to this—Is any irreligious effect produced by the
absence of all direct dogmatic teaching from a school in which the
children are only present a few hours a day, and where they go for
the purpose of learning to read, write, and cipher, with a little
geography and music? I do not think that much evil results from this,
nor do I think that any very great amount of good would result from
any attempt to alter the present system.
In the grammar school, where the instruction is not so mechanical,
the conditions of the question are somewhat different. But even here
I do not think that the tendency of the system is irreligious. I cannot
believe that the cultivation of the intellect, even if there be nothing
addressed directly and formally to their spiritual instincts, is, in the
case of children so circumstanced as these, necessarily evil and
hostile to religion. It would be so if they were confined for all the year,
except the vacations, to the walls of a boarding-school, and the
subject of religion never alluded to. But here again, as was observed
with respect to the scholars of the primary school, the influences of
home, of the church, and of the Sunday-school, ought to render the
silence of the week-day school in a great measure innocuous. And
this is the more likely to be the case with the scholars of the
grammar school, as their parents do for the most part belong to a
higher grade in society.
But if the system be tried in the most legitimate
of all ways, that is by its fruits, I do not think that What is Really
we shall have any reason to be dissatisfied with it. Taught.
The sums raised voluntarily every year in the
United States for the building and maintenance of churches, and for
the support of the ministers of religion, is quite unequalled by what is
collected in the same way among any population of equal amount in
the world. It is impossible to ascertain a point of this kind, but I
believe that it is far greater than what is contributed voluntarily by the
whole of the Latin race. Almost the first buildings raised in the
newest settlements are the churches. No one, unless he has
experienced it, can tell what are the feelings and thoughts that
spontaneously arise on finding yourself, as you enter such a place
as Denver, beyond the prairies and the plains, as it were, welcomed
by the Houses of God, which are the most conspicuous buildings of
the place; and then, again, a few miles further on, as you pass
through the first gorge of the mountains at Golden City, to find
yourself surrounded by a cluster of three churches; and when you
have got up among the little mining towns, perched like eagles’ nests
in the clefts of the mountains, still to find that the object which first of
all attracts your attention is the little tower or spire, albeit of wood,
that marks the building consecrated to God’s service. I was
astonished at the amount collected in the offertory at many of the
churches in which I attended the service. I found the Sunday as well
observed in America as I ever saw it anywhere else. I know that
there are some facts to be set down on the other side, but they do
not counterbalance what I have just been pointing out. And so the
conclusion that I arrived at on this question was, that I should have
liked some direct Christian teaching in the primary schools, and still
more in the grammar schools, but this I knew was impossible. And
on the whole I was not dissatisfied with the results of the American
system of education on the religious character of the people.
Only one point remains—What, after all, do these schools teach?
It has been lately objected to them that they aim at information, and
not at the development of the faculties; and that they do not cultivate
the taste. We are speaking of the common schools, and so of course
are thinking of what school education in America does for the artisan
and labouring class, and the lower stratum of the middle class; that
is, children corresponding to those who are taught in our national
schools, and those of a somewhat higher grade in society. Are the
faculties (for that is the word insisted on by the most recent writer on
the subject) of these two classes at all more developed here at home
by our schools, than they are in America by their common schools?
Or what fruit does our system bear among these classes in the
refinement and the cultivation of the taste? Or, to put the question in
the ordinary way, Are these classes better taught, rendered better
able to use their wits, and rescued to a greater extent from the
brutalising effects of ignorance among ourselves, or among them?
Could the American system do more for these classes? If it could, I
should be disposed to say it might do more for them on the very
point where it is alleged that it does comparatively too much, that of
giving information. But I do not say this because I thoroughly
approved of so much time being devoted not in the least to imparting
information, but to what is the main point in the schooling of those
who must leave school very young—the teaching them to read, to
write, and to cipher, with accuracy and facility. Among ourselves
there is an enormous amount of failure in these primary matters;
among the Americans there is very little failure in them. They teach
their scholars to write with so much ease, that we may be sure they
will never forget or lay aside the use of the pen; and they teach them
to read with so much ease, and so much with the understanding, that
we may be sure they will continue to read when they have left
school. Do our schools accomplish this?
For ‘the development of the faculties,’ which are
big words with rather indistinct meaning, I would The Dawn of a
substitute the concentration of the powers of the Better Day.
mind on special subjects, such as poetry, history,
classical literature, philology, and the different branches of physical
science, and I would say that the Americans as a nation have not yet
arrived at the point where we may expect much either of this, or of
‘refinement of taste.’ At present all their mental strength and activity
is required for the grand work of bringing a new world into subjection
to man. They become settlers in the wilderness, or engineers and
machinists, or merchants, or professional men, or newspaper-
writers. All who enter on these employments are wanted in them,
and can get a living by them. They invite and receive and
remunerate all the energetic minds of the nation. But it will not
always be so. As soon as the continent begins to fill up, and
extension ceases, then multitudes of active minds will not find
themselves called to the same employments as those of the present
generation are. The battle with nature will then be over. By that time,
too, wealth will have accumulated and become hereditary in many
families. There will be many to appreciate, as well as many to devote
themselves to art and literature. It is then that we may expect that
the American mind and American culture will bear their fruit. They
will then, I believe, have schools and styles of art of their own, and a
literature of their own, as untrammelled as that of Greece, and richer
and more varied than that of any other age or country. The day for
these things has not yet come, but we see already the symptoms of
the dawn; and when it has come, I think there will be no ground for
complaining of ‘want of development of the faculties,’ or of ‘want of
refinement of taste’ in America.
I trust that no word has been inadvertently set down in this book,
should it be so fortunate as to find some readers among those who
treated me with so much hospitality and kindness, which can in any
way be displeasing to an American. If any from that side shall have
accompanied me through its pages, now that the time for saying
‘farewell’ has arrived, my one wish is, that they may have come to
look upon me somewhat in the light in which one of my Boston
acquaintances told me a week’s intercourse had brought him to
regard me, that is, ‘as one of themselves.’
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 136 Changed: bcomes on that account more disappointing
to: becomes on that account more disappointing
pg 229 Changed: gallopping over a plain
to: galloping over a plain
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Jane Chi Hyun Park

University of Minnesota Press

Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Park, Jane Chi Hyun.

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The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

1. Style, Visibility, Future 1

3. American Anxiety and the Oriental City 51

4. Oriental Buddies and the Disruption of Whiteness 83

5. Martial Arts as Oriental Style 125

6. The Virtual Orient 163

Race . . . has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily

In Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema I attempt to answer

and inﬂuence sociopolitical representations of East Asia and Asian America.

Chapter 4 traces the movement of this techno-oriental other from the

now stylishly visible elements of multicultural America. In a turn that sug-

Style, Visibility, Future

If representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked young white

Yellow Future builds upon and contributes to ongoing conversations in eth-

In 1978 Edward Said coined the term “Orientalism” to describe a tendency

Orientalism was groundbreaking in many ways—not least for inaugurat-

(of European descent), Asian Americans are seen as outside or vacillat-

of virtual relationships to their homelands and adopted homes through the

David Morley and Kevin Robins coined the term “techno-orientalism” to

The fear of this threat focuses on speciﬁc issues, including possible

The Cyberpunk Future

Such techno-oriental imagery was most strikingly present in the near-future

In the preface to Mirrorshades, one of the ﬁrst anthologies of cyberpunk

The cyberpunks are perhaps the ﬁrst SF generation to grow up not

According to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., it was precisely these allusions to

The High-Tech Orient in Cyberpunk and Cyberspace

be a subject.’”27 Chun describes cyberspace as a distinctly oriental space

technology, proceeds to put on a particular kind of masculinized perfor-

In her pioneering studies on representations of race and ethnicity in

representations on the big screen. What my readings have in common with

This tendency of popular media to represent race as real seems to contradict

The meaning of race is deﬁned and contested throughout society, in

of both dominant and marginal groups. We experience this most deeply

Racism . . . organizes aﬀects by conferring upon them a stereotyped

the stereotype as “a form of knowledge and identiﬁcation that vacillates

other that needs to be eradicated (xenophobia) or a proximate other that

This study is premised on the notion that critically interrogating oriental

of non-Western inﬂuences in the dominant cultures of Europe and the

At the same time, the nonhyphenated, ahistorical white citizen cele-

You can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a

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