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 Chi Hyun 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.

About the Author
Jane Chi Hyun Park is lecturer of gender and cultural studies, University of Sydney, Australia.

Reviews

"Yellow Future's emphasis on 'oriental style' is interesting and fresh. I can see other scholars in the field picking up this term and running with it, both in their writing and teaching. Jane Chi Hyun Park has written an excellent, useful book." -Lisa Nakamura, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Book Information
ISBN 9780816649808
Author Jane Chi Hyun Park
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 23mm