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Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
Paperback
Series: Asian America
Asian American StudiesFilm StudiesRegional: West
ISBN13: 9781503639089
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: May 14 2024
Pages: 274
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.62 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.
1 different editions
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Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
Gow, William
Hardcover
Also from
Gow, William
Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community
Gow, William
Hardcover
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