Introduction
“Yellowface” makes the Asian body as unmistakably Oriental. Only Orientals are yellow, not Asians. Asia is a place, a big place, so there are many colors and hues. Orientals have overbites, slanted eyes, and mustard yellow skin color=socially defined as markers of racist differences. What does yellowface signify? Race is a mode of placing cultural meaning o the body. Yellowface marks the Oriental as indelibly alien.(2)
POLLUTION: objects or persons perceived to be out of place. They create a sense of disorder symbolicaly and anomaly in the structure of society. A source of pollution: Aliens/foreigners.
Foreign v Alien Foreign objects are not always alien, only those whose presence disrupts the nattative structure of the community. FOREIGN: refers to that which outside or distant, while ALIEN describes things that are immediate and present yet have a foreign nature. Only when the freign is present does it become alien. Alien v foreign is like immigrant vs. tourist. So if an outsider comes without an intention to leave it becomes an alien. Only when aliens exit or are “naturalized” (cleansed of their foreignness and remade) can they shed their status as polltants. Alienness is both a formal and political/legal status and an informal, but no less powerful cultural status
Takao Ozawa was the denied the right to “naturalize” because he had Japanese “blood.” US v Thind, an Indian immigrant who was already an American by naturalization was stripped of his citizenship because his blood is not white blood.(3)
POPULAR CULTURE AND RACE
The Supreme Courts “understanding” is a legal fiction. It gives popular conventio, the common sense of “real” Americans, the power to define race. Popular convention has the power.(5)
popculture is a process, a set of cultural practices that define Amrican nationality-who “real” americans are in any historical moment. nationality v citizenship CITIZENSHIP:carries the implicit assumption of promise if equality, at least in political and legal terms, while NATIONALITY contains and manages the contradictions of hierarchies and equalities of social formation. (6) Race can be “invisible” or camouflaged or rendered invisible, but once produced as a category of social difference it is present everywhere in the social formation and deeply imbedded in popular culture. RACE WILL ALWAYS BE THERE & SEEN. RACE IS POPULAR CULTURE.
SIX FACES OF ORIENTAL
The POLLUTANT: originated in mid nineteenth-century California. The Chinese constituted the alien presence in america. the chinese was both identified with the moral chaos of the gold rush and portrayed as the harbigers of industrial wage slavery.
the COOLIE: came about the US working class was formed in the 1870s and 1880s. chinese immigrants found themselves segregated into racially defined state of subordination as “coolie labor” the UNfree, servile, a threat to the white working mans family. (even though they came to america as FREE workers).
the DEVIANT: a figure of forbidden desire. the deviant represents the possibility of alternative desire in a period which middle class gender roles and sexual behavior were being codified and naturalized into a rigid heterosexual cult of domesticity. WOMEN WERE FORCED INTO PROSTITUTION. Men were then brought in to be domestic house servants.
the YELLOW PERIL: A threat to the nation, family, and race.
the MODEL MINORITY: popularly identified in the late 1960s and 1970s. a mythology substituted a narrative of national modernization and athnict assimilation through heterosexuality familialism and consumption. MODEL MINORITY: THE PERFECT WORKER.
since the 1970s, the model minorty image has coexiste and reinfoced a representation of the Asian American as a GOOK.
the GOOK: Asian american represented as the invisible enemy and the embodiement of inauthentic racial and national identities.
with all these stereotypes NON of these have been created by the ACTUAL LIVES of asian americans.
