Fu Manchu Research Articles

Research on Social and Cultural Stereotypes of Chinese Men in Hollywood Films: A Case Study of "The Mask of Fu Manchu"

To better penetrate the international market and gain a wider international audience, Hollywood has made films with rich and varied themes based on the cultures of various countries. Given China's rich cultural heritage and vast market, Hollywood has made many films set in China t open up the Chinese market and carry out cultural exchanges between China and the West. However, due to the misunderstanding between cultures, there are prejudices and stereotypes of Chinese men's society and culture in Hollywood films. This study applies the case study method in the qualitative research method and takes〈The Mask of Fu Manchu〉 film as a case study to systematically analyze Fu Manchu's external characteristics such as gender, t, and form, as well as internal characteristics such as behaviors and personalities. It is found that the Chinese male socio-cultural symbols in the film are oversimplified and culturally misinterpreted, leaving the audience with a stereotypical impression of cultural homogeneity. Based on this, this study explores multiple perspectives from history, culture, and art to find ways to eliminate stereotypes of Chinese men in Hollywood films, promote producers' understanding of different cultures, build a positive image of China, and provide a path for viewers to correctly understand Chinese culture.

Fu Manchu and the characterization of the Chinese as yellow peril in Spain

This article traces the Chinese characters presented as the anti-Western threat in Spanish culture, namely the Yellow Peril discourse, which has not received adequate attention from the academia. Since the 19th-century, Chinese characterization in Spain has taken place as an especial cultural phenomenon, in which the connotation of “peril” first emerged from a press representation from France and England. After a period of inner circulation of stereotypes, it is revived by the irruption of Anglo-American popular culture, in the form of a well-defined Fu Manchu in the first half of the 20th century. The authors examine two films directed by Jesús Franco: The Blood of Fu Manchu and The Castle of Fu Manchu, co-produced by European production companies and shot partly in Spain. In the whole process, the “peril” associated with Chinese characterization maintains both its “vicarious” and “referential” representation. Thus, Jess Franco’s cinematographic version of Fu Manchu anticipates the postmodern pastiche and turns Fu Manchu into an entire “empty” cultural entity. The article aims theoretically to differentiate “media culture”, which is a fertile terrain of both stereotypes and its extreme form, pastiche, from other types of high culture and popular culture. In the case of Chinese characterization in Spanish culture, media and a culture shaped by media can be considered as the producers of the Chinese peril phenomena.

The Problem of Sinophobia in Daniel York's PlayThe Complex of Dr. Fu Manchu

تهدف هذه الدراسة الى إلقاء الضوء على مشكلة رهاب الصين أو الخوف من سيطرة الصين على العالم في مسرحية دانيال يورك "عقدة فو مانشو" والموضوعات ذات العلاقة بالعرق والعنصرية. حيث تجيب الدراسة على أسئلة كيف يرى البريطانيون الصينيين. والطريقة التي يرسم بها يورك صورة الصينيين في عيون البريطانيين. وقد اولى الباحثان مشكلة رهاب الصين ، التحليل والمناقشة كمشكلة كانت سائدة في كتب فو مانشو للكاتب ساكس رومر في أوائل القرن العشرين واصبحت واقعا في الوقت الحاضر لما اكتسبته الصين من قوة اقتصادية وسياسية . مسرحية عقدة فو مانشو هي عبارة عن مسرحية هزلية ساخرة تسخر من أي رغبة استعمارية للإمبراطورية الفيكتورية ، فضلاً عن الأمن الوهمي للعرق ، الذي يقال إنه انتقل بمرور الزمن إلى البريطانيين البيض. المسرحية هي رد فعل واضح ومباشر للتصوير المسرحي البريطاني للصين وكراهية الأجانب على نطاق أوسع. إنه يمثل تعبيرًا قويًا ورفضًا للاضطهاد الذي عانى منه BEAs. المسرحية عبارة عن لغز كوميدي / جريمة قتل تدور أحداثها في شرق لندن في القرن التاسع عشر ، حيث يبحث رجلان إنجليزيان عن العبقري الصيني الشرير فو مانشو لأحباط خططه وأنقاذ إنجلترا من الصينين الأشرار . تستنتج الدراسة ان مخطط السيطرة على العالم من قبل الصين كان ولازال كابوسا يؤرق الغرب فهذا ما كان يعمل عليه الصينيون دائما ولازالوا يحاولون حتى هذا القرن.

Games archcriminals play: Mabuse vs Fantômas

The modern understanding of crime and criminals is rooted in game-playing. Videogames engage players as active participants in fictional crimes, and news stories routinely present the heads of powerful criminal organizations as players, distinguishing the archcriminals who head these organizations from the more proletarian lackeys they employ. Archcriminals have been particularly common in serial fiction, where the longer narrative arc allows for the unfolding of successive and increasingly complex criminal schemes that escalate in audacity and consequence. As Ruth Mayer has shown, the link between supercriminals and seriality goes even deeper, establishing these criminals as liminal, deceptively flat and indeterminate figures whose viral presence is everywhere but whose identity remains hidden behind their public branding: ‘Whatever the master criminal instigates is geared toward and subject to spread and expansion. And, more generally speaking, so is the figure itself.’1 Mayer, who identifies Fu Manchu as an incarnation of ‘the yellow peril’, contends that ‘The serial mode through which the Fu Manchu stories have been disseminated is in perfect concord with the stock imagery illustrating yellow peril scenarios’.2 Mayer and Shane Denson have gone on to argue that ‘the seriality of a serial figure is really not that different from the seriality of a serial killer’, because the liminality of the serial figure – its existence at the intersection of various contradictions and material contingencies – proves to be its most crucial attribute. The serial enactment of recurring figures, figure constellations, or plot lines revolves, in all of our case studies, around fundamental conceptual or ideological inconsistencies which are dramatised or showcased, rather than ‘reflected’ or resolved. […] the ideological parameters of a serial figure are manifested in the serial structure of its enactment; ideology works as series.3

Sanctified Sinophobia, Christian Nationalism, and M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger

Abstract: This article examines the bestselling 1898 novel The Yellow Danger , a so-called Chinese invasion fantasy that inspired Sax Rohmer’s infamous Fu Manchu series. Where analysis of The Yellow Danger has tended to underplay its religious dimension, I argue that its depiction of the Yellow Peril constitutes a prototype of what I call “sanctified Sinophobia,” religiously motivated hostility toward China that now fuels contemporary Christian nationalism. Both as a characterological emblem of racial personality and as an eschatological force of nature, the Yellow Terror represents an ineffable Satanic malevolence, defying European Christians’ existing categories of evil. Tracing these two variants of sanctified Sinophobia in Shiel’s novel, I then examine how the text’s logics of ethnoreligious purity continue to structure the prayers, benedictions, and oracles of so-called China Virus discourse.

Sanctified Sinophobia, Christian Nationalism, and M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger

Abstract: This article examines the bestselling 1898 novel The Yellow Danger , a so-called Chinese invasion fantasy that inspired Sax Rohmer’s infamous Fu Manchu series. Where analysis of The Yellow Danger has tended to underplay its religious dimension, I argue that its depiction of the Yellow Peril constitutes a prototype of what I call “sanctified Sinophobia,” religiously motivated hostility toward China that now fuels contemporary Christian nationalism. Both as a characterological emblem of racial personality and as an eschatological force of nature, the Yellow Terror represents an ineffable Satanic malevolence, defying European Christians’ existing categories of evil. Tracing these two variants of sanctified Sinophobia in Shiel’s novel, I then examine how the text’s logics of ethnoreligious purity continue to structure the prayers, benedictions, and oracles of so-called China Virus discourse.

Fu Manchu, Hollywood Cinema, and Orientalism in the Work of Juan Marsé

Juan Marsé is one of Spanish literature’s most cinematic writers. Marsé himself has talked extensively in interviews about his passion for Hollywood cinema and the important role it played during his childhood in Barcelona. Critics such as Samuel Amell, Kwang-Hee Kim, and Jorge Marí have studied the influence of cinema on Marsé’s writing, both aesthetically and in terms of subject-matter. One aspect of Marsé’s relationship to twentieth-century cinema culture that has been overlooked by scholars, however, is his engagement with the medium’s Orientalism. Hollywood cinema has a long and sustained history of employing orientalist tropes and capitalizing on the widespread yellow peril discourse. An analysis of three of Marsé’s most critically-acclaimed novels, Si te dicen que caí (1973), El amante bilingue (1990), and El embrujo de Shanghai (1993), demonstrates how Marsé has recycled transnational tropes associated with the yellow peril, such as the figure of Fu Manchu, in ways that address concerns particular to the twentieth-century Spanish and Catalan contexts. Using Homay King’s theorization of orientalist mise-en-scène, this article argues that Marsé employs tropes borrowed from Hollywood cinema to highlight questions of identity, truth, and survival, themes that constitute an important through line in his writing.

모범적인 소수민, 아시아계 미국 남성성, 그리고 『미국 출생 중국인』

This essay interrogates the model minority discourse and explores its counter-discourse in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006). Paying special attention to the historical context of racialization of Asian American men in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this essay sets out to investigates how such literary characters as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan have developed American cultural biases against Asian American men. Pointing out that toxic racist narratives are intertwined with the model minority myth, this essay goes on to examine how Yang’s graphic novel challenges the model minority discourse of Asian American masculinity. American Born Chinese braids three different protagonists, each corresponding to a distinct narrative medium: the Monkey King (Chinse folklore), Jin (ethnic buildungsroman), and Danny/Chin-Kee (TV sitcom). My essay probes how all of the three stories examine the model minority myth and its attendant racialization of Asian American men. In doing so, I conclude that American Born Chinese asserts the conversion of the model minority into the “Asian American” as a new alternative discourse for Asian American men.

Casting Fu Manchu by Eelyn Lee

Commissioned by Chinese Arts Now, a UK organization that typically supports live theatre, music, and dance, but responded to the pandemic with a series of digital commissions, Casting Fu Manchu took the form of an edited digital performance that reflected Lee’s dual backgrounds in devised theatre and filmmaking. The gender-conscious casting choices were particularly striking in dialogue with an extract from the movie Daughter of the Dragon, in which Anna May Wong, playing Fu Manchu’s daughter, pledges to become his son in order to avenge him, a moment that queers assumptions of East Asian femininity even as it reinforces conventional gender roles. At the close of the performance, when the cast listed their dream roles in theatre and film, we were left to reflect on how few of these modest dreams are likely to be realized in an industry within which, as York Loh suggested, casting directors who grew up with Fu Manchu are still clinging to the image of China and East Asia he perpetuated, unwilling to cast Asians who stray too far from his distorted image.

‘The China Virus’: Invasion, Contagion, and the ‘Yellow Peril’

‘The China Virus’: Invasion, Contagion, and the ‘Yellow Peril’

“The Daughter of Fu Manchu”

Abstract Courses regarding race, gender, and representation are not easy to teach under any circumstances, but even more so in predominantly White classrooms in the post 9/11 United States, where the masses have been fed a diet of xenophobic, anti-Asian propaganda inculcating an “us” versus “them” mentality. This article analyzes the discourse of empire, a metaphor that has been used time after time to construct a mythical and menacing Other. In contrast, the portrait of Asian women in cinema and television news as traditional, veiled, and inhabiting a separate sphere adds to this representation of Asian cultures as premodern and irrevocably opposed to the West, much as portrayed in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. The author illustrates this transnational feminist critique with a documentary used in Women’s Studies classes, Deborah Gee’s landmark film Slaying the Dragon (1988).

Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War, and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction by Ailise Bulfin

Reviewed by: Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War, and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction by Ailise Bulfin Richard Scully (bio) Ailise Bulfin, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War, and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), pp. 288, £85 hardcover. In her first monograph and latest contribution to the field of invasion studies, Ailise Bulfin asks: What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes, and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? The chief answer is that this rogues’ gallery of literary and pop culture monsters reflects British society’s fear of invasion and subversion by foreign powers or peoples and the degeneration that would either enable or result from such an invasion. This is not something new, of course, as Bulfin is acutely aware. For most of her academic career, she has been a principal member of the Invasion Network. An international research group focused on the phenomenon of invasion fiction and popular culture in Britain and beyond, the network draws together scholars from Europe, North America, Austral-asia, and elsewhere and encompasses all manner of disciplines. Bulfin and the network, in particular Harry Wood, Michael Matin, and Kim Wagner, have produced a growing body of scholarship that advances the field pioneered by I. F. Clarke with Voices Prophesying War, 1763–1984 (1966). As a leader in her own scholarly context, therefore, Bulfin is well-qualified to take the analysis of invasion fiction much further and does so admirably. Taking a British as well as a more global perspective and cutting across different genres, she demonstrates how gender and social anxieties and geopolitical fears of invasion could be deployed by different political persuasions for different purposes. Bulfin examines the better-known canon of British authors, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling, as well as those who were popular in their day but have not fared as well given the condescension of history or literary criticism. These include the Australian-born Guy Boothby, the enigmatic William Le Queux, and the early science fiction master M. P. Shiel. Although these authors are referenced throughout Bulfin’s study, each makes a particular thematic subgenre their own. Kipling is prominent in the first chapter, “Gothic Invasions from the East and West Indies.” Boothby is important for chapter two, “Gothic Invasions from Egypt,” and, along with Shiel, chapter four, “Yellow Peril Fiction.” Doyle’s work underpins Bulfin’s third chapter, “Mephistophelean Master Criminals,” and Le Queux is central to the fifth chapter, “Military Invasion Tales.” Gothic Invasions is forensic in its analysis of the different monsters that populate the chapters. Bulfin covers well-trodden ground around the origins [End Page 637] of the Dracula story and offers more revealing insight into the literary origins of the mummy, Fu Manchu figures, and Horrible Huns. Bulfin’s readable, enjoyable prose makes Gothic Invasions an approachable book for scholars from all manner of disciplines and at all levels of sophistication—by no means an easy accomplishment. For scholars of Victorian periodicals, Bulfin’s research points to new directions of inquiry. Drawing upon a host of well-known and little-known magazines and papers, she analyzes published versions of many invasion stories in their original serialized or periodical form alongside their appearance as books. Going beyond the periodicals of metropolitan London (albeit a major focus of Gothic Invasions), Bulfin includes references to tales first appearing in regional organs, such as Carlton Dawe’s “The Yellow Man,” which appeared in the Derby Mercury between May and October 1900. The “host of obscure periodical stories” Bulfin has uncovered makes this volume a definite addition to our knowledge of the broader culture of serialized writing (63). She also demonstrates how periodicals influenced such stories, with the Spectator and Windsor Magazine engaging invasion tropes and Academy and Punch featuring comic lampoons of the invasion fiction boom. Both serious and humorous representations indicate the pervasiveness of such fears in the minds of nineteenth-century Britons. The expansion of the periodical market itself, Bulfin reminds us, was in part responsible for the flood of invasion fiction in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In turn, such stories helped sustain periodicals...

The Serpent

The Serpent Wayne Karlin (bio) If not for the sign in front of the gravel parking lot, the permanently sputtering and fly-specked neon Budweiser advertisement, and the Happy Hour sign behind the dirt-filmed glass of the window, the Rondezvous Bar and Lounge could be taken for the house of a heartbroken widower who no longer gives a damn: loose boards, green paint peeling off loose boards, a porch shaded by a sagging tin overhang, the roof shingles winged up here and there or missing in patches, with the underlying creosote sheets showing through like wounds. The sign always bothered me when I drove by the place, as if the misspelled French would confirm some redneck stereotype of the county to visitors. I once pulled in, had a beer, and mentioned the mistake in the spelling to the owner, Tom Delaney. Delaney, a three-hundred-pound man with a shaved head, Fu Manchu moustache, prison tattoos, and cigarette burn scars on hairy arms, had lowered his head, looked at me, and growled, "What are you, a Democrat?" He gave me the same look as I came in now. He was wearing a black Harley Davidson t-shirt, sagging black jeans, and scuffed engineer boots. He wiped the bar counter with a rag that looked like it could have been used to wipe grease from his motorcycle, if he had had one. He didn't. Some of the tattoos that had been on his arms were gone also, replaced by the red burn and pucker of laser scars, defoliated patches in the pelt that covered his arms. The tattoos had included the shamrock symbols of the Aryan Brotherhood, but as it turned out, he'd never been in prison or owned a motorcycle. In fact, he drove a Subaru wagon and had bought the bar, apparently fulfilling the shape of some lifelong dream, after he'd sold an arts-and-crafts supply store his family had owned in PG county. When I'd gotten his background information from our sheriff, Russell Hallam, I'd felt disappointed: it turned out that both he and the bar were concepts themselves, like the '50s-style diners I'd see in Bethesda or Tyson's Corners or Annapolis, as if nothing of our time now on earth could be anything but shadows on the cave wall, legitimized only through older models. Delaney's tattoos had gone after some actual Aryan brothers had seen them and given him a choice between erasure and amputation. As far as I knew, though, none of the other clientele saw the bar or Delaney as anything more than they purported to be. I'd never told anyone what Hallam [End Page 78] had told me about Delaney, and as long as the Brotherhood didn't come around, he was a man content in his reinvention, at it for so long that he'd become it. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I spotted Joleen Baird, sitting in a booth near the bathroom, a glass and a nearly empty pitcher of draft beer in front of her, her finger pushing thin wakes out of the net of foam on the scarred tabletop. She was the only customer, which, it being ten in the morning, was not surprising, though not always the case. She turned to me, and I saw her in the light of the Coors neon waterfall near the mirror. She looked lacquered. I don't mean drunk. I mean lacquered. As if someone had poured a gallon of lacquer over her head that had dried and encased her in a sheen. Her blonde hair sat like a helmet on her head, and her face—bright-red lipstick, penciled eyebrows, artificial lashes—looked as if a wax death mask had been fastened to it. Like the bar and Delaney, she'd become a painting of herself. Thinking that, I remembered how in middle school I'd tried to earnestly explain to her the correct the spelling of her name—some early marker, I suppose, of my journalistic predisposition. It should be j-o-l-e-n-e, I told her. Later, I found out that the...

Is Fu Manchu Still Alive? Sexuality and Yellow Peril Stereotypes Among White Expatriates in Taiwan

This paper examines the oscillations of Western stereotypes regarding the Chinese. The research uses a multidisciplinary approach by combining a genealogical study of the character of Fu Manchu with recent fieldwork in Taiwan among Western expatriates. The combination of these studies reveal an insight regarding the staging of whiteness from the global scale of international relations down to micro performances of quotidian expatriate life. A particular focus is on how expatriates make use of spatial configurations to accentuate their fantasies of superiority. The paper identifies the universalism of such Western performances as a parochial cultural element and embraces a method of conducting fieldwork without denying the subjectivity of the ethnographer.

The many faces of fu manchu:white expatriate community in Taiwanand the genealogy of a raciststereotype

Bu araştırma, dört yıl boyunca Tayvanda yapılmış bir saha çalışmasının ürünüdür. Bu süre boyunca Tayvan’da yaşayan beyaz, batılıların yerliler üzerine kurgulamış oldukları ırkçı stereotipleri inceledim. Sahada toplamış olduğum verileri, popüler kültürde yaygın olarak görülen Çinli stereotipleriyle karşılaştırdım. Ortaya çıkan sonuç ırkçı genellemelerin, batılı beyazların kendilerini algılayışlarındaki önemini ortaya koyuyor. 1913 den beri farklı medyalarda ortaya çıkan Fu Manchu adlı karakter bu algı değişimlerini ölçmek için son derece uygun bir araç olarak ortaya çıkıyor

Claiming Bruce Lee's Sex: Memoirs of the Wholesome Wife, Memories of the Salubrious Mistress

Claiming Bruce Lee's SexMemoirs of the Wholesome Wife, Memories of the Salubrious Mistress Celine Parreñas Shimizu (bio) The book cover of Bruce Lee: The Man Only I Knew (1975) features him bare-chested on the right with big, black, bushy hair topping a dark handsome face, lips pursed together and eyes intent with confident purpose. Bruce Lee, a man known for his small, slight stature and perilous strength, appears large as he leans into the frame, extending his fist toward us. We can clearly see the rippling texture of his torso and chiseled, muscled arms. The flexing of his body reveals adherence to a disciplined physical regimen and affirms his reputation of brute strength made famous by his one-inch punch. Below his medium-shot image and to the left, a very large close-up of the book's author Linda Lee's dewy and blushing face appears. She has a short, blonde, no-nonsense hairdo, coral lipstick on full half-smiling lips, and blue eye-shadowed lids; her long lashes emphasize the wideness of her eyes as she looks up at her husband's figure with adoration. The foregrounding of her image as a wholesome white woman is juxtaposed against his iconic visage as the most celebrated Asian male in global popular culture. His smaller image renders the book's premise in visual terms: we will hear about him through her intimate perspective from inside a celebrated interracial marriage. From the title of the book and its byline, "By his wife Linda Lee," the marital connection between writer and subject appears as its central conceit. The dedication to their children, "that they might know the rich legacy which is theirs alone," shows how the book's author takes specific ownership of Bruce Lee. This possession further extends with the subtitle: "the man only I knew." Published two years after his death at the age of thirty-two, Linda Lee's book promises to reveal the man behind the star as a husband and father devoted to domesticity. To envelop Bruce Lee in the domesticity of family counters the descriptions of him as hypermasculine but asexual. That is, Bruce Lee's sexuality is understood as macho in narcissistic, nationalist, and ascetic terms by scholars and critics.1 So Linda Lee's claiming for her husband the role of American hero, in [End Page 92] terms of an upright and proper heteronormative and hegemonic manhood, certainly contrasts with the legacy of the Oriental coolie and Fu Manchu as outlined well in the work of Robert G. Lee. Rendering Bruce Lee as the ideal husband provides a different sexuality for Asian men, whose subjectivities are usually anxious, insecure, and disprized in US representations of marital and romantic capital. In terms of Asian North American men lacking masculine virility and sexual power in representation, scholars Jachinson W. Chan, David Eng, Richard Fung, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Viet Nguyen, and Eng Beng Lim have called for feminist and queer readings of Asian manhoods so as not to fall into the trap of romanticizing Asian masculinity.2 Indeed, what is so striking in Bruce Lee's appeal and what is so understudied in his image is his sexuality, which Linda Lee definitively binds within the normative bounds of heterosexuality, marriage and fatherhood. This wifely and motherly claim is significant because of Bruce Lee's purported mistress, the Hong Kong B-movie star Betty Ting Pei, who stars as herself in a controversial film about his life. Released just three years after his death, the film Bruce Lee and I (1976) is a fictionalized account of its subtitle: "His Last Days, His Last Nights."3 The film, directed by Mar Lo, famously includes explicit sex scenes and bacchanalian drug consumption of both pills and pot, in the narrative context of an all-consuming, frenzied, and torrid love affair. The Chinese theatrical poster for the film, released in the United States in 1979 as I Love You, Bruce Lee, features a full-figured Bruce Lee kicking his leg high as his upper body bends down almost horizontally. In contradistinction, to the right of this powerful pose, another image shows him relaxed. Bare...

Book Review: Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology, by Krystyn R. Moon

Book Review: Mayer, Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology, by Krystyn R. Moon

From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film by Naomi Greene

Reviewed by: From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film by Naomi Greene Ying Xiao (bio) Naomi Greene. From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. 264pp. Hardcover $65.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3835-5. Paperback $25.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3836-2. From the worldwide popular figures of Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Kung Fu Panda, and Mulan to famed film classics such as Broken Blossoms, The Good Earth, Shanghai Express, The Manchurian Candidate, and Kundun, Naomi Greene’s From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda: Images of China in American Film is a thorough and brilliant study that pivots toward one central question: how has China been perceived and portrayed in American films from the silent era to this day? The author, thereby, navigates a wide range of significant symptomatic works, figures, and [End Page 115] moments involved in the formation of Hollywood’s view of China and treats the subject carefully with academic rigor, keenness, and compassion. Recent years have seen an expanding scholarship that facilitates and furthers our understanding of the images of China populating America (and other nations), bourgeoning and propelled by ever-important Sino-American relations, massive migration, and global interactions. Greene demonstrates remarkable erudition and familiarity with her case studies, primary sources, and critical readings in the field such as Edward W. Said’s foundational work Orientalism (1979) and Gina Marchetti’s Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993). This monograph nonetheless stands out as a truly comprehensive, in-depth inquiry into the intersections of film and history, China and the West, one that, as Greene posits in the opening remark, “explores the historical arc of American film representations of China from the point of view of the tensions between the self and the other, or broader still, those between America and China” (p. 16). From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda is thus informed by a fundamentally historiographical framework, that is, how to read and write about American film history from the vantage point of its varied portrayals and interactions with the racial and national other. How did Hollywood’s perceptions and attitudes toward China and the Chinese, moreover, reveal about the American innermost self? Finally, how were such images shaped by, and in turn how did they shape, the broader social, political, and historical landscape in which they were made? Greene explores these issues from a historical angle with which she is most adept; prior to this piece, she has published a series of essential works on European film and history.1 This latest project further proves Greene as a veteran film historian and an excellent comparatist who alternates and brings together the East and West, and traces the trajectory of Hollywood’s representation of China with great ease and compelling detail. The book comprises six chapters ordered in chronological fashion. In my opinion, it is a fruitful film archaeology project that excavates and chronicles American cinematic appropriation of China corresponding to the shifting social, political, and cultural impulses across different eras. In the first chapter, Greene introduces and maps out the very important role China has played in American history as well as in Hollywood film. The convoluted, century-long relationship is often characterized and complicated by a rather mixed and conflicting sense of fear and fascination. Greene, then, conceptualizes this bifurcated vision of the Chinese otherness as “the pendulum,” which “swing[s] from intensely positive images of China to those that are relentlessly negative” (p. 3). Thus the main thesis of the book can be easily discerned as Greene has clearly pronounced: “like historical documents, films mirror the dramatic shifts of the pendulum, the opposing constellations of images, that have marked the United States’ relationship to China” (p. 10). By innovatively invoking the pendulum trope, the monograph brings vividly to life the vital, unique ways in which China has occupied the American [End Page 116] mind-set. The remainder of the book is, in one way or another, devoted to attesting and elaborating the viability of this metaphor in Hollywood production. However, upon closer...

Adventure and Detection in Charles Gilson’s Fiction, 1907–1934

Before Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu became household names, San Francisco-born detective Mr. Wang and his rival Jugatai, the Manchu head of the Secret Society of Federated Asia, entertained young British readers in the early twentieth century. This article examines these under-explored characters, created by the prolific military officer-turned-writer Charles Gilson. It explores how Gilson developed a fictional formula that appealed to young readers and made slight variations to it in order to keep those readers interested. The characters of Mr. Wang and his nemesis Jugatai are also examined in terms of the conventions of the adventure story; in particular, the classic detective story stereotypes of the Chinese and fears of the yellow peril are subject to analysis. It is seen that Gilson created Mr. Wang as a respected character possessing many positive traits. However, to some extent, Mr. Wang is also a mouthpiece to support Western involvement in China, while Jugatai is an evil plotter destined to fail because of the superiority of the British. Therefore, although Gilson pushed some boundaries in detective fiction by featuring a Chinese detective more than a decade before the creation of Charlie Chan, he still conformed to certain formulaic plotlines of the boy’s adventure story genre.

Seriality and Persona

Persona is a public presentation of identity. One of the key values of a persona is its consistency in its presentation of the self. This article is designed to be the first exploratory steps and overview in charting the idea of seriality in relation to persona and its utility as a concept to describe the constancy and transformation of identity that is now elemental to understanding contemporary persona or the public presentation of the self and its online manifestations. Seriality in terms of persona is first investigated from its entertainment culture origins – with its use in the constitution of characters in fiction in novels, films, games and most prevalently in television. Several examples of serial persona will be analysed with an emphasis on how television has constructed often the most powerful personas: Kevin Spacey’s persona as Frank Underwood in House of Cards is discussed in greater detail in terms of the economic, cultural and affective value of serial persona and its associated formations of risk. It then explores the blending of the fictional and the real in seriality through how popular music performers – in particular Eminem - construct an authentic register of persona to allow for the exploration of the self through emotion and connection. The article concludes with thinking how seriality is connected to the constitutions of online identity and links the concept with aspects of virality and meme culture and their constructions of value, patterns and constancy as it relate to the presentation of the public self.