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“Jesus God, it’s Anna May Wong!”: Labor in the Margins
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Zoom
Anna May Wong (1905-1961), the first famous yet marginalized early 20th-c. Chinese American screen-stage-TV performer, is finally getting overdue nationwide recognition in the US, with her image ingrained and memorialized in the newly minted quarter coin issued in 2022 as part of the American Women Quarters Program. Yet, how to grapple with her legacy remains a thorny question. The difficulty has to do with two factors. One: most of her roles were inglorious race-gender stereotypes churned out by the exclusionary and prejudiced Hollywood “dream factory.” Two: not quite a star, Wong spent the majority of her life hustling and playing minor roles, supporting the white female star. Despite her newly minted nationwide recognition, her life-career could hardly be upcycled into a testimony of the “American dream.” So, what exactly is Wong’s legacy, aside from her iconic significance as the first famous Chinese American performer? My presentation takes seriously the fact that the bulk of her career was built upon playing small roles in films and TV shows. Departing from star studies that spotlights the star glamour and the star’s center position on the screen, I refocus on Wong’s leverage of the margins and the background of screen. Shining light on her flitting yet remarkable appearances as a supporting performer, I argue that her unglamorous and belabored performances not only call attention to entertainment industry’s racializing and hierarchizing apparatus, but also reveal how the center stage is both constructed and deconstructed by the peripheries she occupies. In other words, far from a mere victim of the exclusionary entertainment industry, Wong, along with other racialized performers, worked from the margins to challenge white stardom and white heteropatriarchy. READ MORE...
Coup and Protests in Myanmar
Zoom
by Dr. Renaud EGRETEAU (CityU of HK) , Dr. Maung Zarni and Dr CHAN, Sze Wan Debby(CityU of HK) on 24th May 2021 (Mon) 17:00 (HK), 10:00 (UK) READ MORE...