:Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s‐1920s

Abstract

Similar to recent works on U.S. orientalism, Krystyn R. Moon's book argues for the centrality of popular cultural discourses on Asians and Asian Americans in shaping American culture and national identity. Moon's monograph examines how white, Chinese American, and African American songwriters, musicians, and performers have constructed and contested racial differences and hierarchies through the practice of “yellowface,” a set of racially coded modes of musical production and theatrical practices that conveyed notions of “Chineseness” as inherently foreign and inferior to American or European culture and society. While previous scholars have discussed yellowface as part of their inquiry into the formation of American orientalism, Moon is the first to provide a broad survey of yellowface performance and music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By placing the history of yellowface alongside more familiar forms of racial performance such as blackface minstrelsy, Moon points out that yellowface's emergence was part of the broader formation of a national racial vernacular on the American stage that delineated the boundaries of American identity, marking certain racial groups such as blacks as American and others such as the Chinese as perpetually foreign and incapable of national incorporation. Even as yellowface performances became more totalizing and codified with specific practices ranging from costume, makeup, orchestrated gestures, dialect, props, and musical sounds, Moon argues that yellowface constructions of racial difference and hierarchies remained unstable and ambivalent, with Chinese simultaneously taking on the polar extremes of “aversion and fascination.” She proposes viewing the history of yellowface performance in dialectical terms as a contestation between white musical composers and performers and Chinese and Chinese American performers. Even as white performers and songwriters highlighted the exoticism or cultural and physical inferiority of the Chinese in their racial performances, Chinese and Chinese American performers through their physical presence and performance on stage challenged white hegemony over the constructions of Chineseness.