Sheng-Mei Ma

Off-White (eBook, ePUB)

Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people.

Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an "off-yellow," darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. November 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501352188
• Artikelnr.: 57982430

Autorenporträt

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specializing in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (Bloomsbury, 2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (Bloomsbury, 2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016) among them, he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right.

Sheng-mei Ma is professor of English at Michigan State University.