Yellowface during the Exclusion Era by Esther Kim Lee (review).
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The history of yellowface has received steady interest among a small groupof scholars from a variety of disciplines, and Esther Kim Lee’s Made-Up Asians isa critical addition. Moving beyond the performances themselves, and the ways inwhich they reflect and reinforce stereotypes, Lee explores the theatrical tech-nologies that undergird the entertainment industry and allowed white actors toembody characters of Asian ancestry. Costuming, makeup, and prostheticsfacilitated the creation of supposedly authentic characters, all the while deny-ing Asian and Asian American actors’ opportunities to perform and potentiallyundermine stereotypes. Academics today recognize the inherent issues tied toyellowface, however, as Lee astutely notes, “[t]here is currently no well-definedframework to hold what can be known about yellowface in the U.S., or to articu-late how we know what we know” (p. 5). This problem has real world impact inthe entertainment industry and drives the metanarrative of Made-Up Asians. Tosupport her argument, Lee contends that the development of these theatricaltechnologies coincided with the Exclusion Era, a period of rampant anti-Asianrhetoric in American popular culture that buttressed numerous anti-Asian gov-ernmental interventions and the rise of evolutionary racism. Additionally, theconnections among American politics, science, and the entertainment industryare not solely problems of the past. Despite the efforts of Asian American artists,activists, and scholars, yellowface has persisted into the twentieth-first centuryand continues to be practiced through digital technologies such as CGI. Thus,while the technologies of exclusion have evolved over the past two hundred plusyears, concerns surrounding the types of stories told by the entertainmentindustry and who participates in the creation and performance of those storiespersist to today.
Author: Krystyn R. Moon
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7082269104
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