Yellowface minstrelsy: Asian martial arts and the American popular imaginary.

Abstract

Yellowface minstrelsy is an analytic tool I have devised to examine the plethora of Asian martial arts images in American film, television, magazines and newspapers since the early seventies. Yellowface minstrelsy describes the use by non-ethnic Asians in the United States of Asian martial arts, artists and artifacts for fun and profit. Yellowface minstrelsy is meant to reference blackface minstrelsy, in particular Eric Lott's analysis of its antebellum variant, and indicates my contention that the 19th-century blackface minstrels and the yellowface minstrels of today bear fruitful comparison when comprehended as raced and gendered carriers of ideological meaning. The dissertation's chapters analyze a range of key examples. The adoption of Asian martial arts training and garb by U.S. politicians is on the surface a positive gesture in its evocation of Asian discipline, efficiency and strength; it masks, however, the history of exploitation and violence directed against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, much of it by the government. The spectacle of minstrelsy enables cultural amnesia, aptly described by Michael Rogin. The evocation of Japanese sumo wrestling in American popular culture reflects both valorization and derision. The sumo wrestler's bulky power is often parodied to exaggerate pathologies of over-consumption; religious ritual becomes primitivized spectacle; hairless nudity is seen as infantile asexuality. American media coverage of the caning of Ohio teenager Michael Fay in Singapore (1994) reflects both the idealization and demonization of Asian martial arts. Here Asian martial arts came to be identified with a blatant patriarchal assertion of power, at first condemned for its physical violence and dominance toward an Anglo-American by an Asian, but subsequently not only accepted but valorized as an appropriate manifestation of discipline in a law-and-order society. Chuck Norris' Walker: Texas Ranger fuses Asian martial arts attributes of violence and discipline with the role of the Westerner, patriarchal enforcer of civilized values and Christ-like arbiter of good and evil. While valorizing Asian martial arts in the large, there is still a place for viewers to construe excessive violence as alien and Asian.