Racial Stigma On The Hollywood Screen From World War Ii To The Present

Features

Description

This book charts the evolution, from the World War II period to the present day, of racial relationships and their repercussions in Hollywood films and examines a neglected sub-genre.

Review:

Not merely an overview of anti-Asian portrayals in mainstream cinema, Locke cogently argues that Asian villainy in popular film enables a national fantasy, the disavowal of institutional discrimination via the spectacle of reconciliation between white and black.

This book explodes the myth of progressive Hollywood by revealing the ways in which racial inclusion comes at a cost--in this case, to Asian Americans. Refreshingly accessible, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen offers scholars, students, and general readers alike a sharp critical framework for understanding cross-racial representations in popular culture.

Readers will no longer be able to view a mainstream buddy film with the same kind of racial innocence. --Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature Locke will change the way you see the Hollywood film.

No longer will the buddy film be the space of male possibility, of the reconciliation between white and black. No: the Asian intrudes. The cost of unity in the dark is called out, particularly as the white buddy hands the Asian the bill for racism. Nothing doing, says Locke. He sets the record straight. --Vijay Prashad, author of Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity.

Too little has been said about Hollywood's mythic representation of interracial bonds, and even less about the complicated ways in which these ties bind some and exclude others. Locke's study of the interracial buddy film helps to redress this by engaging in a critical examination of how male bonds forged between African American and white characters conjure up the illusion of racial equity in America by vilifying Asians as ineluctably foreign.

Locke reads Hollywood films against the backdrop of changing attitudes toward race in America and skillfully links fictio