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“Jesus God, it’s Anna May Wong!”: Labor in the Margins
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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...
從「驚天動地」到「寂天寞地」：陳寅恪、唐君毅與隱微寫作
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一九四九年新中國成立，知識分子面臨重大抉擇。陳寅恪南下廣州，唐君毅輾轉來到香港。五十年代兩人治學方向都有微妙轉圜：陳寅恪研究《再生緣》及柳如是傳奇，唐君毅則在《中國文化之精神價值》中評鑒傳統戲曲及說部。世變之際，文學成為兩人觀照歷史、辯證思想的方法。陳寅恪自謂頌紅妝之事，以待來者；唐君毅更藉《水滸傳》反省生命從「驚天動地」到「寂天寞地」的道理。他們字裡行間所留下的暗碼系統，召喚我們在不同的時代作出不同的解讀。 READ MORE...