Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema

by Jane Chi Hyun Park

Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style.
Park provides a genealogy of oriental style through contextualized readings of popular films-from the multicultural city in Blade Runner and the Japanese American mentor in The Karate Kid to the Afro-Asian reworking of the buddy genre in Rush Hour and the mixed-race hero in The Matrix . Throughout these analyses Park shows how references to the Orient have marked important changes in American popular attitudes toward East Asia in the past thirty years, from abjection to celebration, invisibility to hypervisibility.
 Unlike other investigations of racial imagery in Hollywood, Yellow Future centers on how the Asiatic is transformed into and performed as style in the backdrop of these movies and discusses the significance of this conditional visibility for representations of racial difference.

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Alice, as in Wonderland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean, I liked it. Being that it was the second book on Asian Americans in media that I read this year, I liked it significantly less than the other one, but a large part of that was because of its scope. Yellow Future told me it'd talk about Hollywood and I mostly feel like I got a rant about Blade Runner and Ridley Scott. Not that... there's anything wrong with that necessarily, I just wish that I would have known that that was what I was getting into. I suppose I just didn't feel that this book was comprehensive? It was meticulous and detailed in the few things it did talk about, but it didn't cast the wider net that I wanted. It's still an interesting and worthwhile book by any means, it just wasn't as broad as Techno-Orientalism, which I understand is both due to Yellow Future's more specific topic and singular author. Even so, I still wanted it to be more than what it was.

And it's an expanding area of observation, and I'm fine with that.

[saturn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible look at orientalism in science fiction and dystopian cinema.

[Manda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it for class and found it very interesting.