Tracing the development of Chinese American Orientalism from the Chinese Village at the World Columbia Exposition in 1893 through the its presentation in China City and New Chinatown on the eve of the Second World War, I demonstrate how this counter-hegemonic discourse eventually was incorporated back into mainstream Orientalism and used to justify the needs of a diversifying nation-state.This dissertation makes important contributions to a number of areas of study including racial representations in Hollywood film, Asian American participation in the film industry, the history of California and the American West, and the sociology of race. As an interdisciplinary project produced in the Ethnic Studies Department at U.C. Berkeley, the dissertation remains in conversation with disciplines including film and media studies, U.S. history, and urban sociology. First and foremost though, this project is grounded in the political and epistemological imperatives of Asian American studies. While the field of film studies has had a robust and wide-ranging engagement with Asian cinema, film studies work on Asian Americans relationship to the Hollywood film industry has remained much more limited. Due in part to the paradigm of national cinema, it seems at times as if the field of film studies has difficulty comprehending an Asian American subjectivity outside of the lens of Diaspora. That is to say that film studies scholars are often more comfortable seeing film and media representations produced by people of Chinese descent in North American as part of cultural Diaspora grounded in East Asia,square pot than they are of seeing these works alongside those of African American, Native American and Latinx cultural producers engaged with concepts of race, difference, and social power.
Because of this, the limited scholarship on race and cinema in film studies has developed primarily through a focus on African American engagement with film, leaving work on Asian American, Native American, and Latinx film participation much less developed. Given this paradigm, it should not be surprising that the earliest scholarship on Asian Americans and film developed not out of film studies but rather out of the field of Ethnic Studies in the 1970s. At a moment when film studies was dominated by questions of psychoanalytic film theory with its focus on the cinematic apparatus and its effects of film on the subjectivity of the film spectator, Asian American activists, media makers, and academics were forging the foundations of the scholarship on Asian Americans and film. While there were no essays on film or video included in the earliest Asian American studies reader Roots published by UCLA Asian American Studies center in 1971, the follow up reader Counterpoint published in 1976 contains a section on “Communication and Mass Media” with an essay by Judy Chu on Anna May Wong.Around the same time the author Frank Chin along with members of the Combined Asian American Research began the process of interviewing Asian American actors and others who associated with the film industry.The decade also witnessed the publication of the first monograph devoted to the topic in Eugene Wong’s On Visual Media Racism. Developing out of this earliest scholarship, Asian American studies has advanced its own academic narrative on Asian American engagement with film. This scholarship begins by focusing primarily on issues of Asian American representation on screen during the silent film and classical Hollywood periods. This scholarship on Asian American representation during the silent and classical periods is supplemented by work on well-known Asian American performers such as Anna May Wong, Philip Ahn, and Sessue Hayakawa.The focus of the field then shifts to examine Asian Americans as media producers beginning in the 1970s with the advent of Asian American Asian American media collectives such as Visual Communications and Asian Cinevisions .
In this way the scholarship in Asian American studies on film moves broadly from a focus on Asian Americans as an object of the cinematic gaze in the period before 1970 and then shifts to focus on film as a medium for Asian American self-representation in the period after 1970. Work on Chinatown in the silent and classical film periods follows this trend by focusing on Chinese Americans as objects of representation. There exists a number of essays on the D.W. film Broken Blossoms, studies of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan Films, and essays and books about Anna May Wong.There are a handful of exceptions to this, most notably work by Ruth Mayer and Bjorn A. Schmidt.Schmidt’s book examines cinematic depictions of Chinese Americans as productive forces that shaped immigration laws and policies in the period between 1910s and the 1930s. In two chapters devoted to Chinatown films, Schmidt shows first the way that Chinatown films constructed dominant conceptions of an old Chinatown as an underground site of violent crime against representations of a new Chinatown as modern and built for tourists. Bjorn then moves on to discuss the ways that many silent Chinatown films replicated the tourist gaze of the Chinatown tour. Mayer in her essay on Chinatown films demonstrates the importance of the curio store to silent cinematic representations of Chinatown during a moment when consumer culture in the United States was both consolidating and diversifying. This dissertation contributes to and departs from this recent scholarship in that it shifts the focus away from the ways that film represented Chinatowns and instead focuses on the Chinatown residents as cultural producers. While drawing heavily on scholarship within film studies on Asian American representations and stars, this project foregrounds the way members of the ethnic enclave utilized Chinatown as a medium of cultural production. Los Angeles Chinatown’s proximity to the film industries magnified the opportunities for local Chinese Americans to utilize Chinatown to mediate dominant ideas of race, gender, and nation, but the film industry did not create these opportunities. Chinese American merchants in New York and San Francisco beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began using Chinatown as a medium of cultural production to advance their own depictions of Chinese people.
The rising popularity of film as one of the most popular forms of leisure ensured that by the 1930s, Chinese Americans in Los Angeles possessed a greater ability to shape the national idea of Chinatown than Chinese Americans in New York and San Francisco. Given this focus on the development of race and gender as social categories within the United States, this dissertation is also in conversation with the literature within the field of sociology on Chinatowns as ethnic enclaves. Whereas the topic of Asian American engagement with film has remained somewhat marginal to film studies,drainage collection pot the topic of Chinatown was central not only to the development of sociological theories of ethnic enclaves in the first half of the twentieth century but more broadly to the development of the entire field of urban sociology around the same period. Many early sociological studies on Chinese Americans were influenced by the work by Robert Park and his Chicago School of urban sociology and his work from the first half of the twentieth century. Park argued in his race relations cycle that when two ethnic or racial groups come in contact with one another these groups go through a four-stage cycle of contact, conflict, accommodation, and eventually assimilation.This and other ideas within the Chicago School of sociology were deeply rooted in notions of human ecology, which is the study of the ways humans relate to one another and to their environment. Park believed that human life was divided into two levels the biotic and the cultural and that social organizations of cities were a direct result of the competition for resources.Focusing on human biology as a basis for difference, scholars in the Chicago School largely rejected earlier continental thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and George Simmel, who saw the larger social and economic forces of capitalism as being fundamental to understanding human interaction.As such, these early sociologists were not interested in offering a systemic critique of American nationalism, racism, or empire, nor were they concerned in any but the most marginal ways with determining how these and other forms of power structured the lives of Chinese Americans. Rather sociologists studying Chinese Americans influenced by the Chicago School asked a much less critical set of questions about the extent to which Chinatowns facilitated the assimilation of Chinese Americans into US society.The earliest scholarship on Los Angeles Chinatown developed out of this framework and was produced by a handful of Chinese American graduate students in the Sociology Department at the University of Southern California between the 1930s and 1950s. Master’s theses by Kit King Louis, Mabel Sam Lee, and Kim Fong Tom as well as a doctoral dissertation by Wen-hui Chen all addressed issues of Chinese American assimilation and generational differences in Chinese American ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In addition to these studies in sociology, Master’s theses by Charles Ferguson in Political Science at UCLA , Edwin Bingham in History at Occidental College , and by Shan Wu in the business school at USC from this same period represent some of the earliest scholarship on Chinese Americans in Los Angeles.
While the model advanced by Park is no longer the central lens used by urban sociologists, the way that scholars in this tradition define Chinatown has remained surprisingly similar to this earlier generation of ethnic enclave scholars. Scholars in sociology continue to use the term Chinatown to mean Chinese American ethnic enclave and in the process these sociologists foreground ties of ethnicity and culture over ties of place and geography. For example in 1992 sociologist Min Zhou wrote, “I treat Chinatown as an economic enclave embedded in the very nature of the community’s social structure offering a positive alternative to immigrant incorporation.”She goes on to explain that this enclave “is not so much a geographical concept as an organizational one.”Zhou is clear that this economic enclave must be distinguished from an ethnic neighborhood. While most of the businesses in Zhou’s enclave are concentrated in Manhattan’s Chinatown, many are situated elsewhere. Using this definition, she further excludes from her study non-Chinese owned businesses that are based in Chinatown.Peter Kwong was a scholar who was openly critical of many of the arguments advanced by Min Zhou, and yet he nonetheless worked from a similar definition of Chinatown as an ethnic enclave tied together by social and economic relationships.Thus one of the Chicago School’s most long lasting influences on the study of Chinese Americans may be a definition of Chinatown as an ethnic enclave, loosely connected by place and bound primarily by social and ethnic ties. At it’s best this ethnic enclave literature remind us that Chinatowns are not homogenous but rather socially stratified collections of individuals, institutions, and organizations. Works in this ethnic enclave tradition like Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet along with the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California’s Linking our Lives focus on how gender stratifies and influences the lives of women in San Francisco and Los Angeles Chinatown respectively.Other scholars have taken a more global approach. Work by Peter Kwong foregrounds nationality as opposed to race while discussing divisions of class in New York Chinatown. Jan Lin’s Reconstructing Chinatown shows how global capital interacted with national, and local forces to shape the nature of Chinatown. Regardless of whether these scholars focus primarily on the stratification within the ethnic community in a way that is US-centric or on stratification within the ethnic community in a way that links the global, national, and the local, these and other works in the ethnic enclave tradition remind us that power structures Chinese ethnic enclaves just as it structures the rest of society. While there have not been many recent academic studies that look at Los Angeles Chinatown in the first half of the twentieth century, key historical studies have focused on the Los Angeles Plaza and the other areas that make up the core of Los Angeles. This project builds on this growing literature on the multiethnic history of Los Angeles. As part of his broader exploration of the Los Angeles Plaza, William Estrada looks at the development of China City in relationship to Olvera Street contrasting Christine Sterling’s roles in the two projects.Mark Wild looks at Chinese as one group that lived in what he calls the central districts of Los Angeles in the first three decades of the twentieth century.