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AAST355 Digital Concept Map@sharluvie ૮˃̵֊ ˂̵ ა Joseph Lee, (12/2/25 …

- - - - Film by Jigna Desai
        
        films can be used to examine public culture as a space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state
        
        (of social groups) identities formed by their experience of mass-mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life
        
        film is an institution that maintains racial order so the want for representation in film becomes a modality of cultural citizenship (92).
        Wow, so this stands out to me in giving a reason why being socially accepted can feel and be such a big deal.
        
        we can see how Asian Americans are viewed/framed (stereotypes)
        
        we must be represented and represent ourselves but it itself isn't positive nor negative
        
        film and media also marks and determines those who deserve access to citizenship
        
        12/4/25
        Makes sense and probably intentional but I love how the readings build upon eachother.
        
        BUT TO THE MAIN POINT:
        
        couldn't help but to connect the importance of cultural citizenship and its relationship to film from Desai's view to this reading by Lopez.
        They both related and if anything Lopez's writing supports Desai's (though I'm unsure whose came first). Desai writes with the tone of "we" and Lopez only bolsters that with the fact we can only have cultural citizenship with collective effort. Desai also notes how the citizenship itself isn't a positive or negative thing which Lopez also supports in expressing how conflicting and varying it can be especially in regards to representation. In my opinion, though there can be so much variety, it mustn't be anything confusing and so debilitating but instead something that encourages conversation, education and collective curiosity (compared to the harm of judgement especially within schools of thought or communities organized together in Asian American Media Activism).
    - - In Search of Asian American Cinema by Peter Feng
        
        "Asian" is not used in Asia but is a label from the West
        
        Historically, Asians in America were pitted against each other
        
        Is it harmful to combine all Asian Americans together when discussing culture? (33)
        
        If film is in institution upholding white supremacist beliefs then could there ever even be more ethnospecific categories of "Asian American" films? Maybe it makes sense to why there is so much confusion about what it means.(33) Maybe the definition can just depend whether the film is being referenced to be an activist sort of thing. Like how it is debated to keep Asian American without a hyphen even when grammatically needed.
        
        Some discourse about mainstream media often combining Asian and Asian American film into one. If there will always be this confusion on what is considered Asian American would it be better to use that as a boon? (33) It becomes an apparatus to make
        
        Always seems to feel like compared to other races, Asians & Asian Americans get heavily put together.
        
        "there is a market for Asian American Cinema--the problem is, it's a market that looks for Asian faces and looks no further" (Feng, 33).
        
        There won't be a precise def for AA cinema until film critics, makers, programmers, audience, etc all agree (33).
        
        Are Asian Canadians included? (34)
        
        auteur: a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie
        
        Are films not about Asian Americans but by Asian American filmmakers considered AA cinema?
        
        The Asian American Cinema Movement happened during the seventies and is different from Asian American Cinema in general or at least from the modern sense (35)
        
        ooh I never considered the grammatical power and meaning of a "hyphen". How the hyphen can insinuate that we are caught between two distinct cultures instead of being Americans with an Asian heritage (35)
        
        "I reveal my belief that the words we use to describe the world influence the ways we see it" (35).
        
        9/16/25
        Connection from Feng to Peng
        Idea of film as an institution so the meaning and narratives can be critiqued in a political lens. A lof of the ideas stem from racist to capitilistic ideologies. It made me think of how Lotus Flower's character becomes objectified and related to nature. Objects are usually seen as disposable under capitalism.
    - - The Other Question - Stereotype, Intolerance, and the Discourse in Colonialism by Homi K. Bhabha
        
        "For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures" (95)
        
        stereotypes thrive on being a probabilistic truth
        
        self-reflexivity means the capacity to examine itself often to the point of acknowledging its own nature or construction
        
        stereotypes repeated over time, creating a sense of fixity
      - 9/15/25
        
        Colour-as-hue and colour-as-race: early Technicolor, ornamentalism and The Toll of the Sea by Xin Peng
        
        race and skin tone should not be conflated as it can lead to the idea that the development of colour cinematography leads to better representations of racial differences
        
        skin tones in Toll of the Sea were not made to be accentuated
        
        there was not a lot of colour yellow in early Technicolor film
        
        one of the most important goals of natural color processes and colour cinematography was the reproduction of a "pleasing flesh tone" (289)
        
        chromophobia: loathing of colour; "a fear of contamination and corruption by something that is unknown or appears unknowable" (289)
        
        colour becomes a part of the ornament
        
        see colour beyong a biological index for race but as an artifice (tool to decieve) through people are racialized
        
        perihumanity: being perceived as both human (personness) and object (thingliness)
        
        reified: to make something abstract more concrete and real
        
        History of Technicolor being associated with exotic spectacles and ornamentalism
        
        "The perception of the 'flesh tint' was based on a specific notion of whiteness" and highlithing white feminine beauty
        
        the red-orange tints in the Technicolor colour scheme is designed to besty reproduce Caucasian skin tones
        
        The Toll of the Sea as a Technicolor film is "realist" as it portrays the East as the West's fantasical idea of it; the exotic as colourful and the Orient as ornamental
        
        Lotus Flower is almost framed beside the flowers and meant to be associated as the props and landscape setting contrasted to the idea that actors were usually set up to stand out against their backdrop
        
        9/16/25
        The Toll of the Sea
        
        (3:17) The white man is referred to as "gift" and later on as they discuss how desirabe American husbands are they even note how they are allowed to spend their money (showing the desirability of marriage dynamics and more liberal views compared to the values the West appoints to China. Also connects to this idea of white masculinity being more desirable to the barbaric masculinity of Asian men. Also Lotus Flower is referred to as "little Chinese girl" furthering the infantilization of the Asian women.
        
        (17:30) Kenneth receives a rose, a metonym of Lotus Flower, then breaks it after deciding to go back to America without her. She is discardable like an object.
        
        (42:20) As Allen comforts and pets Lotus Flower as she cries, we get to see the wife then petting a peacock, a symble of the exotic. There seems to be this comparison of care as his comfort seems more not genuine. It's almost patronizing and further bolsters the idea that she is being infantilized.
        
        The wife in comparison to Lotus is portrayed as more womanly, kind, and motherly.
        
        9/17/25
        Made-Up Asian by Esther Kim Lee
        
        Yellowface: "the theatrical convention of using makeup, costumes, and visual technology to transform someone to look East Asian" (1).
        
        paired with costumes, sets, or sounds that evoke the fantasies of the exotic
        
        traced back to representations of "Oriental" or "barbarian" characters on European stages from European stages
        
        The U.S.'s most prevelant type: The "Chinaman" with slanted eyes, buckteeth, bald forehead, darkened skin, long mustache, cone-shaped hat, and baggy clothes
        
        Decorative orientalism: fusing racial fantasy with the consumption of commodities (6)
        
        "During the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds and thousands of Chinese people were forcibly deported, lynched, and driven out of towns on the West Coast" (6)
        
        History of Chinese immigration in America shows how they were seen as a racial threat (from the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and The Immigration Act of 1924
        
        Yellowface as a tool for exclusion by making out Asians to seem suspicious and undesirable (8)
        
        "'Asia is not only a political concept, but also a cultural concept; it is not only a geographical location, but also a measure of value judgement'" (9). (Sun Ge)
        
        Yellowface was even a tool used by European, African American, and nonwhite actors to gain more assimilance to whiteness (free white persons)
        
        Yellowface is technical, political and artistic
        
        Techne from Technology means to reveal what was previously unknown and bring into existence something new
        
        wow... many hours and effort put into perfecting the rubber material used to create an epicanthic fold in non Asian actors to do yellowface...
        
        Yellowface can't be grouped in to how blackface minstrelsy is categorized under the concepts of mirroring or mimicry because of how Asians were excluded from the national imaginary (esp during the Exclusion Era) (12)
        
        Yellowface brought up a new reality as most Asians in the arts featured Asians in Asia, rather than America, participating in the barring og Asians from the national identity Americans imagined during the Exclusion Era (15).
        
        9/18/25
        
        South Asians and the Hollywood Party: Peter Sellers and Brownface Performances Davé
        
        "brownface performance are re-creations of Orientalist roles that diminish the
        threat of Asian immigration through the portrayal of comic and harmless
        South Asian characters" (19)
        
        contemporary brownface and brown-voice was modeled from British comedy (Peter Sellers's Indian Character Hrundi V. Bakshi
        
        His role marked the transition from British to American ideas/interpretations of South Asians (model minority) (20)
        
        comedy objectifies difference by emphasizing a disimilarity to what is considered normal
        
        film target audiences were never Asians which is why these harmful stereotypes and devices were used
        
        "The act of desiring the other is intimately linked to racial impersonation" (24)
        
        3 themes in colonial narratives of India: mystical place, foreign geographical landscape with distinction between the poor and wealthy, primative hordes and rebels in northern frontier of India (24).
        
        Bakshi in The Party highlights the switch from a colonial subject of the British to an Indian cultural object (centering the views of the U.S.); highlights the association to Indian spirituality and music that are also not a threat to American interests (model minority)
        
        Indian Immigrants and Citizens in the United States: Crashing the American Party after 1965 Davé
        
        When South Asians appeared in media, they were associated with: cultral artifacts and practices than with individuals/people, sources of comic amusement, alternative times or genres
        
        Sellers in The Party was one of the first depictions of the brown-voice of Indian immigrants in the U.S. and how he did it influenced future depictions as well
        
        Indians occupy an ambiguous racial position because it shares a historical link to American Indian & Native American first encounters w/ Europeans
        
        This would be considered mimicry
        
        9/20/25
        
        When Dragon Ladies Die, Do They Come Back as Butterflies? Re-Imagining Anna May Wong by Cynthia W. Liu
        
        concept of dismantling stereotypes and refunctioning representation
        
        Wong's characters were always percieved as villain or victim bc of the roles she got (dragon lady, lotus blossom or butterfly stereotypes)
        
        dragon lady: masculine racial pride
        
        lotus blossom: generalized image of fragility
        
        butterfly: naivete and self-abnegation (rejecting oneself)
        
        her characters often committing suicide over their white lovers cosoles Western audiences as it enforces colonial power over the East
        
        the image and stereotypes of her roles have led to expectations Asian women internalize and act upon
        
        these dominant cultural views of Asian Americans control the topics and thoughts of film studies and Asian Americans themselves (Ideas of Judy Chu) (25)
        
        "'In practice, because of the subservience to white male social power, non-white males have been redited with non-masculine, effeminate characteristics"' (26)
        
        the critical project becomes propping up hetero-normative, Asian-masculine desirability; I feel like this could have drawbacks too though like putting pressure on Asian American men to act or be hyper masculine and supporting ideas of patriarchy
        
        is it the responsibility of filmic images, in the pursuit of dismantling harmful stereotypes, to reproduce the world faithfully? (call back to hooks)
        
        Could be better to ask who among Asian American audiences have consumed and contemplated the roles Wong played
        
        refunction representation: to transform a seemingly straightforward process by intervening in the productive apparatus; i.e. labeling Wong's roles and works
        
        in the dismantling stereotypes school of criticism, they want to deconstruct Anna May Wong as a signifier of exoticism, curelty and Asian depotism (cruel exercise of power)
        
        "The sexual scandal is the primal scene of all star discourse, the only scenario that offers the promise of a full and satisfying disclosure of the star's identity" (30)
        
        miscegenation = mixing of races
        
        9/20/25
        Daughter of the Dragon
        
        (4:00) why is Ling Moy speaking in third person? Also I notice her voice is deep and slower than the white people's more normal conversational tone. She also always seems to be looking up at people with her eyes creating an intimidating aura.
        
        (6:04) White man describes Ling Moy as "exotic". These films were not so subtle about the way they view Asian Americans.
        
        (9:03) The notes from Fu Manchu feature images of dragons; somewhat stereotypical symbol of China, and the idea of the dragon lady
        
        (10:01) The return of infamous Fu Manchu with underlit lighting that highlights the feelings of fear and evil associated with him; he is played by Warner a Swedish man
        
        They gave him a thin mustache and goatee, eyebrows that create a triangle at the ends, and eye makeup that gives him slanted eyes
        
        (18:51) "The blood is mine, the hate is mind, teh vengeance shall be mine". Creates a sense of biological evil and natural opposition against this image of white vs Asian (Chinese) that the Fu Family and Petri Family rivarly has. Ling feels a familial, honor, or duty to enact revenge for her father's sake even though she only just reconnected with him.
        
        (18:56) Fu Manchu calls Ling his flower daughter, a reference to the lotus blossom stereotype? He views her as weak
        
        (25:42) One of Fu Manchu's servants refer to Ling and ronnie, the son of Pretrie family as the leopard and the deer (who is who?). I'm guessing Ling is supposed to be the leopard?
        
        (25:47) Ling says, "The Chinese heart is very constant Ronnie. It might be sadly wounded in one of your western affairs". This line shows again like in The Toll of the Sea there is this idea that white husbands cheat and that Asian women are meant to be subjected to these types of heartbreaks and never being enough.
        
        (30:34) Pans to a sign that says "Kim Lee GreenGrocery" as Ah Kee recieves a secret match note from him. Insinuates a secret spy like connection Asian Americans might have with each other.
        
        Is this some trans Mulan story? Lots of misogynistic points about being weaker and crafty than if Ling was born a son.
        
        (40:22) She says she would rather kill herself than kill Ronnie
        
        Ling was hesitant to kill Ronnie but so ready to poison Ah Kee, and then tries to stop him from leaving by trying to manipulate his love for her. I'm confused on if she was really in love with him.
        
        Background noise is limited (no music or backtrack) except for near the end when it is thundering. Sort of like a divine or mystic message or omen.
        
        after Ronald 'rejects Ling Moy's heart", all love leaves her and she suddenly becomes abruptly fully evil to enact vengenance. Joan becomes a vicitm, an image of white feminity compared to the dragon lady
        
        (1:08:58) "Flower Ling Moy, a flower need not love but only feel loved. Ah Kee loves you" and they both die.... ; call back to lotus blossom trope
        
        The Hypersexuality of Race by Celine Parreñas Shimizu
        9/25/25
        
        (class note) What racializes Asian American women is their perverse interiority and vulnerability to oppressive sexual representation
        
        Scopophilia: the derivation of pleasure, often sexually, from looking at people, bodies, or erotic media
        
        I think about the contrast between the early roles of Anna May Wong that we've watched and then future roles of Asian women in film when discussing hypersexuality (such as the scene from Full Metal Jacket we saw in class). It made me think about how history and world events affect the narrative pushed out by the film industry and how satirical that scene was about the more harsh reality of sexual violence Asian women faced in times of war, especially by white and or American men. The prostitute basically selling herself and them negotiating her body like it's a random item sold at a store creates this idea that the women during those war times were okay with it.
        
        I also think about the difference in the hypersexuality of Asian American women in film and the asexual representation of Asian American men in film. Say, for the Asian American men, we give them more "masculine" roles that rely on being desirable, would it not just be putting an Asian face on this white man template that upholds patriarchy and in turns harms women and then the men its claiming to represent in a meaningful way.
        
        In the aspect of the Shimizu's point to embracing the hypersexuality, it makes me wonder how that could relate to an important point Liu asks in their article: Could it be better to ask who among Asian American audiences have consumed and contemplated the stereotypes and roles the characters show and represent in film? Are there Asian American women who look up to the roles actresses like Anna May Wong or Lucy Liu play and feel like they have to adhere to similar behaviors to be deemed enough or desirable?
        
        1 more item...
  - - - 9/8/25
        
        The Cheat
        
        Idea of non-white men's "barbaric" desire for white women; foreign savagery
        
        the branding by Haka to mark things that belong to him (18:20)
        
        Supposedly Sessue's character was Japanese but Japanese Americans protested and the director re-released the film 3 years later changing the character to Burmese (only because there wouldn't be enough Burmese Americans to raise a credible protest
        
        Sessue became a movie star from this film with a rabid white women majority fan base; he became a sex symbol
        
        He was denounced as a national traitor in Japan
        
        Aren't a lot of full face moments on screen and seems to have Rembrandt lighting that sculpts the face and evokes some more mystery
        
        A lot of those moments with silhouetes and shadows especially after Edith finds out she lost her money; evokes sense of secrecy and taboo
        
        He brands her (33:21) which is this aborhent thing when white people had a history of doing that to African Americans. Or maybe that's why they hated it more because "how dare a POC do that to a white person?"
        
        (35:20) husband breaks the screen door representing secrets to find the shot Haka
        -(43:26) "East is East and West is West and never the Twain shall meet"
        
        They protect the woman and both husband and wife walk out applauded as if they are the heros. The woman basically gets her sins atoned for by jailing Haka.
      - 9/16/2025
        hook's Connection to Peng's writing:
        Movies transporting viewers to a "rich make-believe land", in the case of films exploiting or appropriating cultures and relying on harmful stereotypes, can create metonyms. Like The Toll of the Sea becoming known for its beautful flower gardens and dress and representing the exotic and fanatastic landscapes of China.
        
        9/20/25
        Film as an institution under capitalism and especially in America so under white supremacist systems, create debates and battles between the role and definition of Asian American films. There's no doubt the importance of representation but as bell hooks brings up, how much, if at all, should films be realistic and faithful to the world?
        Some questions:
        
        if our world has ignorant people with ignorant beliefs, and films made with the audience geared towards a majority white audience, has racist or harmful stereotypes, is that not also a faithful perception of the way people view others? Or is it the fact that it is a stereotype and not true that turns that film into this other place bell hooks mentions movies bring us to
        
        How much power do movies have in their ability to "brainwash" or be a tool of propoganda
        
        Can films ever get the Asian American experience "right"? Does film as an institution need to be dismantled and reestablished? What could that look like or mean?