Download or read book Performing Chinatown written by William Gow and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William Gow argues that Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to shape widely held understandings of race and national belonging during this pivotal chapter in U.S. history. Performing Chinatown conceives of these racial representations as intimately connected to the restrictive immigration laws that limited Chinese entry into the U.S. beginning with the 1875 Page Act and continuing until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. At the heart of this argument are the voices of everyday people including Chinese American movie extras, street performers, and merchants. Drawing on more than 40 oral history interviews as well as research in more than a dozen archival and family collections, this book retells the long-overlooked history of the ways that Los Angeles Chinatown shaped Hollywood and how Hollywood, in turn, shaped perceptions of Asian American identity.
Download or read book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America written by Nancy Yunhwa Rao and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019 Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Download or read book Chinese Americans written by Jonathan H. X. Lee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-11-12 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This in-depth historical analysis highlights the enormous contributions of Chinese Americans to the professions, politics, and popular culture of America, from the 19th century through the present day. While the number of Chinese Americans has grown very rapidly in the last decade, this group has long thrived in the United States in spite of racism, discrimination, and segregation. This comprehensive volume takes a global view of the Chinese experience in the Americas. While the focus is on Chinese Americans in the United States, author Jonathan H. X. Lee also explores the experiences of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Mexico, and South America. He considers why the Chinese chose to leave their home country, where they settled, and how the distinctive Chinese American identity was formed. This volume is organized into four sections: historical overview; political and economic life; cultural and religious life; and literature, the arts, and popular culture. Detailed essays capture the essence of everyday life for this immigrant group as they assimilated, established communities, and interacted with other ethnic groups. Alphabetically arranged entries describe the political, social, and religious institutions begun by Chinese Americans and explores their roles as business owners, activists, and philanthropic benefactors for their communities.
Download or read book Global Spaces of Chinese Culture written by Sylvia Van Ziegert and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of how Chinese communites in the United States and Germany create and disseminate a sense of diasporic Chinese identity. It not only compares the local conditions of the Chinese communities in the two locations, but also moves to a global dimension to track the Chinese transnational imaginary. Van Ziegert analyzes three strategies that overseas Chinese use to articulate their identities as diasporic subjects: being more American/German being more Chinese hybridizing and commodifying Chinese culture through trans-cultural performances. These three strategies are not mutually exclusive and they often intersect and supplement each other in unexpected ways. The author also analyzes how the everyday lives of overseas Chinese connect with global and local factors, and how these experiences contribute to the formation of a global Chinese identity.
Download or read book Not Your China Doll written by Katie Gee Salisbury and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Enlightening, nuanced, and honest.”—Lisa See Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history. Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest. Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film. Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.
Download or read book Trying to Find Chinatown written by David Hwang and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major collection by the preeminent Asian-American playwright.
Download or read book The Linguistic Landscape of Chinatown written by Jackie Jia Lou and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a sociolinguistic ethnography of the linguistic landscape of Chinatown in Washington, DC. The book sheds a unique light on the impact of urban development on traditionally ethnic neighbourhoods and discusses the various historical, social and cultural factors that contribute to this area’s shifting linguistic landscape. Based on fieldwork, interviews with residents and visitors and analysis of community meetings and public policies, it provides an in-depth study of the production and consumption of linguistic landscape as a cultural text. Following a geosemiotic analysis of shop signs, it traces the multiple historical trajectories of discourse which shaped the bilingual landscape of the neighbourhood. Turning to the spatial contexts, it then compares and contrasts the situated meaning of the linguistic landscape for residents, community organisers and urban planners.
Download or read book Yellowface written by Krystyn R. Moon and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining China: early nineteenth-century writings and musical productions -- Towards exclusion: American popular songs on Chinese immigration, 1850-1882 -- Chinese and Chinese immigrant performers on the American stage, 1830s-1920s -- The sounds of Chinese otherness and American popular music, 1880s-1920s -- From aversion to fascination: new lyrics and voices, 1880s-1920s -- The rise of Chinese and Chinese American vaudevillians, 1900s-1920s
Download or read book Contemporary History of Cantonese Migrants in Yokohama Chinatown written by Yee Lam Elim Wong and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book vividly portrays the past, current, and future development of Yokohama Chinatown through the context of its Cantonese residents, grounded through a family history. It is useful for both academic and non- academic readers who are interested in migration history, transformation of urban spaces, anthropological perspectives of integration of immigrants, diasporic studies and overseas Chinese studies. It is informative when considering the role of immigrant communities in the world today in the context of globalization stimulating cross-border movements and anti-globalization forces that act as push and pull factors for migration. It is also a study of harmonious integration of the overseas Chinese community in Yokohama and its ability to retain its own cultural traits, rights, rituals, traditions and dialect language in one of the most homogenous countries in the world. This increases the attractiveness of Yokohama City in terms of ethnic diversity, cosmopolitan multiculturalism and urban space renewal.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater written by Nadine George-Graves and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 1056 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new experiments between dance and theater, and this volume situates this interest in its historical context by extensively investigating other such moments: from pagan mimes of late antiquity to early modern archives to Bolshevik Russia to post-Sandinista Nicaragua to Chinese opera on the international stage, to contemporary flash mobs and television dance contests. Ideologically, the essays investigate critical race theory, affect theory, cognitive science, historiography, dance dramaturgy, spatiality, gender, somatics, ritual, and biopolitics among other modes of inquiry. In terms of aesthetics, they examine many genres such as musical theater, contemporary dance, improvisation, experimental theater, television, African total theater, modern dance, new Indian dance theater aesthetics, philanthroproductions, Butoh, carnival, equestrian performance, tanztheater, Korean Talchum, Nazi Movement Choirs, Lindy Hop, Bomba, Caroline Masques, political demonstrations, and Hip Hop. The volume includes innovative essays from both young and seasoned scholars and scholar/practitioners who are working at the cutting edges of their fields. The handbook brings together essays that offer new insight into well-studied areas, challenge current knowledge, attend to neglected practices or moments in time, and that identify emergent themes. The overall result is a better understanding of the roles of dance and theater in the performative production of meaning.
Download or read book Operatic China written by D. Lei and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-23 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study Lei focuses on the notion of 'performing Chinese' in traditional opera in the 'contact zones', where two or more cultures, ethnicities, and/or ideologies meet and clash. This work seeks to create discourse among theatre and performance studies, Asian and Asian American studies, and transnational and diasporic studies.
Download or read book Transnationalism and Society written by Michael C. Howard and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past, as in the present, transnationalism has played a vital role in the development of wealth, technology and art in all societies touched by cultures other than their own. This timely book provides an introduction to the social and cultural aspects of transnationalism, particularly focusing on the modern world since 1500, with an emphasis on the past 200 years. Topics covered include the role of migration, the development of cities, the effect of transnationalism on marriage and families, the presence of transnational corporations, dress, religion and art. A key text for understanding our increasingly transnational world. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Dangerous Crossings written by Claire Jean Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dangerous Crossings interprets disputes in the United States over the use of animals in the cultural practices of nonwhite peoples.
Download or read book Claiming Diaspora written by Su Zheng and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Framed by a century and a half of racialized Chinese American musical experiences, Claiming Diaspora explores the thriving contemporary musical culture of Asian/Chinese America. Ranging from traditional operas to modern instrumental music, from ethnic media networks to popular music, from Asian American jazz to the work of recent avant-garde composers, author Su Zheng reveals the rich and diverse musical activities among Chinese Americans and tells of the struggles of Chinese Americans to gain a foothold in the American cultural terrain. She not only tells their stories, but also examines the dynamics of the diasporic connections of this musical culture, revealing how Chinese American musical activities both reflect and contribute to local, national, and transnational cultural politics, and challenging us to take a fresh look at the increasingly plural and complex nature of American cultural identity.
Download or read book Interior Chinatown written by Charles Yu and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Download or read book Chinese Street Opera in Singapore written by Tong Soon Lee and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fostering national culture in Singapore through Chinese street opera performance
Download or read book Annual Report written by National Endowment for the Arts and published by . This book was released on with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reports for 1980-19 also include the Annual report of the National Council on the Arts.
