Content area
Full Text
WHITEWASHING THE MOVIES: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in US Film Culture by David C. Oh Rutgers University Press, 2021 210 pp.; paper, $29.95
THE WHITEWASHING OF ASIAN IDENTITIES HAS persisted in American cinema for nearly a century. Film roles such as Richard Barthelmess's portrayal of Cheng Huan in D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) and Mickey Rooney's caricatured depiction of I. Y. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) are some of US cinema's most cited examples of the whitewashing of Asian roles. In Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in US Film Culture, David C. Oh broadens the scope of whitewashing beyond the practice of yellowface in Hollywood's storied past and instead considers the contemporary media landscape. Limiting his case studies to films from the past decade, Oh inquires what the term "whitewashing" entails in the twenty-hrst century. Because of the perceived dearth of scholarship on the subject (save that of the academics he cites in the introductory chapter), Oh begins by creating an operational dehnition of whitewashing, which he describes as having three distinct permutations. The hrst, yellowface-perhaps the most commonly understood representation of whitewashing-occurs when white actors, often through the use of heavy makeup and prosthetics, portray Asian characters. The second occurs when Asian characters and stories are replaced by white characters and stories. The third, which Oh describes as his most controversial intervention, occurs when white characters are centered in Asian worlds. Although this latter form of whitewashing does not necessarily involve active erasure of Asian people, Oh argues that when media producers incorporate this form of whitewashing, they displace potential Asian identities from being portrayed on-screen.
Oh divides his book into a series of case studies, with each chapter focusing on either a single him or a set of related films to examine different types of whitewashing in contemporary cinema. The...