How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China
from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of
pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English
language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old
game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish
fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of
their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface
aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding
speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual
culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white)
people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film
on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate,
Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century
later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and
mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters,
who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime.
This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to
power, so much so that even millennial China creates an
“off-yellow,” darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette
its global ascent.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781501352195
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter