Made-Up Asians
Yellowface During the Exclusion Era
Format:Paperback
Publisher:The University of Michigan Press
Published:11th Jul '22
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Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862–1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century.
“Written for a wide audience from theater aficionados to Asian American performance makers to academics, this timely book illuminates a fascinating archive of make-up conventions derived from instructional manuals and specific case studies from both the stage and the cinema.”
-- Sean Metzger, University of California, Los Angeles"What is notable and made clearer by Lee’s book is how that “science” and things like acting performances worked together to produce the racist ideas that persisted throughout society. ...Esther Lee helps us to recognize and understand how the persistence of these practices comes from their deep roots and connections to the ways that race has been constructed in the US across history."
-- Ethnic and Racial Studies"Essential."
-- Choice, G. R. Butters Jr., Aurora University"Deftly analyzing vastly understudied materials ranging from images of performers in Aladdin to makeup guidebooks, Made-Up Asians adds great depth to theatre historiography and contemporary discussions of yellowface. . . In deeply examining the origins and transformations of yellowface performance, Made-Up Asians helps readers to understand the long and pervasive practices of Asian exclusion in theatre and to ask how to bring forth a different future."
* Amy B. Huang, Theatre History StudiISBN: 9780472055432
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
282 pages