Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816649808)

Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.
Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix. Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.

Author: Jane Chi Hyun Park
ISBN-10: 0816649804
ISBN-13: 9780816649808
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Language: English
Published: 10/05/2010
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2011
Reference and Research Bk News 04/01/2011 pg. 250