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Jul. 14th, 2011 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI wish I could find more nonfiction books like Robert G. Lee's Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture - it's a really excellent example of how to integrate history, cultural studies, and media studies and create a cohesive picture of how all these things affect each other. I'll be honest, when I picked this book up I was basically expecting a set of essays that looked at racism and stereotypes in film and TV. Which would have been fine with me, I really enjoy media critiques! But Lee is drawing a much more comprehensive picture than that. Starting from the 1850s and moving forward, he looks at popular songs and theater and short stories and places them in context with the legislation and economics and cultural changes in a way that I thought was very well-done.
As always with this kind of book, of course, sometimes it's incredibly depressing, but often enlighteningly horrible in ways I had not expected! I mean, what can you do with the play from 1900 about Patsy O'Wang, who suffers the curse that "whiskey, the drink of his father, turns him into a true Irishman, while strong tea, the beverage of his mother, has the power of restoring fully his Chinese character"? There were many points like this where I could not decide whether just to laugh or to bang my head against a wall. Perhaps both!
I didn't agree with all of Lee's analysis, and the book definitely has some serious gaps in its coverage - most notable is the fact that Lee focuses much, much more on men than on women, which leads to some dramatic oversights. Any book on this topic that does not mention Anna May Wong even once is doing it wrong. By contrast, Sessue Hayakawa's films get about half a chapter. (Sessue Hayakawa, by the way: still a fox! I just feel that's always worth mentioning.) I sort of wish that Lee had just decided to call his book "Asian American Men in Popular Culture" and have done with it, because the other half is so clearly an afterthought for him. On the other hand, a lot of my own reading to date has come out of feminist literature and therefore had the opposite focus, so the book was nonetheless very useful for me! And overall it remains a really excellent historical and cultural resource. If anyone has recommendations for other cultural studies that do this kind of thing well, let me know.
(And if you're wondering what happens to Patsy O'Wang, he decides to keep drinking liquor, develops a brogue, and go into politics at Tammany Hall. Happy ending?)
As always with this kind of book, of course, sometimes it's incredibly depressing, but often enlighteningly horrible in ways I had not expected! I mean, what can you do with the play from 1900 about Patsy O'Wang, who suffers the curse that "whiskey, the drink of his father, turns him into a true Irishman, while strong tea, the beverage of his mother, has the power of restoring fully his Chinese character"? There were many points like this where I could not decide whether just to laugh or to bang my head against a wall. Perhaps both!
I didn't agree with all of Lee's analysis, and the book definitely has some serious gaps in its coverage - most notable is the fact that Lee focuses much, much more on men than on women, which leads to some dramatic oversights. Any book on this topic that does not mention Anna May Wong even once is doing it wrong. By contrast, Sessue Hayakawa's films get about half a chapter. (Sessue Hayakawa, by the way: still a fox! I just feel that's always worth mentioning.) I sort of wish that Lee had just decided to call his book "Asian American Men in Popular Culture" and have done with it, because the other half is so clearly an afterthought for him. On the other hand, a lot of my own reading to date has come out of feminist literature and therefore had the opposite focus, so the book was nonetheless very useful for me! And overall it remains a really excellent historical and cultural resource. If anyone has recommendations for other cultural studies that do this kind of thing well, let me know.
(And if you're wondering what happens to Patsy O'Wang, he decides to keep drinking liquor, develops a brogue, and go into politics at Tammany Hall. Happy ending?)
