Cosmopolitan Pleasures and Affects; or Why Are We Still Talking about Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Cinema?

Abstract

It is now widely acknowledged that the postracial fantasies ushered in by Barack Obama’s two-term election success are now in tatters. Yet debates on yellowface casting practices in contemporary Hollywood (also said to have evolved into “whitewashing” practices), in such films as The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010), Aloha (Cameron Crowe, 2015), Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016), Birth of the Dragon (George Nolfi, 2016), and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017), have resurfaced in recent times. These press controversies seem almost anachronistic after a generation of “intercultural” artistic theory and practice, “diversity” management training, and numerous academic discourses on otherness and difference, including those on cosmopolitan theory and practice. This article reviews yellowface practices and debates in contemporary times and puts them in dialogue with cosmopolitan aspirations of being “open to difference”, and argues that the latter cannot be taken as self-evident. It offers a way of thinking about yellowface practice via cosmopolitan pleasures evoked largely through modes of consumption, which “hollow out” the subjectivity of the character being depicted. On the site of the intersection between representation and subjectivity is where the identity politics occurs, yet, rather than universalising the issue, the article argues that a cosmopolitan approach should take on board localised conditions and contexts of production and reception in ways that acknowledge the multilayered complexity of the issues at hand. Yellowface and cinema share their roots in the theatre. Writing about yellowface performance in the nineteenth century, Sean Metzger argues that the “Chinaman” fetish “substitutes for and conceals the dominant anxieties about Chinese immigrants among the white majority in the late 1800s [in America]” (“Charles Parsloe” 628), and the “Chinaman character serves as a vessel, encapsulating a range of anxieties produced by white concerns over the presence of Chinese people in the United States [sic] social and economic order” (“Charles Parsloe” 643). Indeed, yellowface performed as camp and comic representation via the racial impersonation of East Asian peoples (not only Chinese) by way of caricature extended well into the twentieth century—Mickey Rooney’s short-tempered, buck-toothed and heavily bespectacled Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) still jars (Ito)—and also as figures of fear, such as the Fu Manchu figure in numerous books, films, television programmes, comics and radio. Jill Lane suggests that “racial impersonation—acting in the name of place of the other through such practices as blackface, redface, yellowface, cross-dressing, and drag—has played a particularly important role in the imagination and aesthetic articulation of national communities across the Americas” (1730). Yellowface is now, by and large, perceived as an offensive and unacceptable practice, yet it persists, even in films as recent as Cloud Atlas (Lana Wachowski, 2012), in which actors Hugo Weaving and Jim Sturgess have their facial features altered with prosthetics to