This thesis explores the politics and problematics of
Asian American self-representation in popular cinema by
focusing on film adaptations of Asian American texts.
In the first chapter I consider the Chinese American
director Wayne Wang's adaptations of Amy Tan's novel The Joy
Luck Club (1989) and Louis Chu's novel Eat a Bowl of Tea
( 1961). Here I demonstrate how the representations of Asian
Americans in the domain of popular cinema are "simplified"
and constrained to universalizing tropes, such as
"generational conflict," that negate the heterogeneous
factors (i.e. culture, gender, class) that contribute to
the making of Asian American subjectivity. As well, though
I find that both films tend to de-problematize the United
States as a context for the Asian American's assimilation,
Eat a Bowl of Tea, in its historicizing efforts and
cinematic flair, manages to posit a more ironic view towards
the narrative of assimilation than Joy Luck does.
In the second chapter I shift my discussion to David
Henry Hwang's 1988 play M. Butterfly and its film adaptation
by David Cronenberg. The opening (longer) section of this
chapter explores Hwang's critiques of Western (American) discourses of sexism, racism, and imperialism in relation to Edward Said's and Judith Butler's theories of orientalism
and gender performance respectively. When Hwang' s arguments
are also understood in the context of Asian American history
and contemporary debates over "identity" in the Asian
American community, it is possible to see how his antiessentialist
stance challenges all (Western and Asian)
impositions of discursive power. The second section of this
chapter compares the formal/performative construction of the
play to that of the film version. Here I argue that Hwang' s
utilization of Brechtian theatrical techniques corroborates
his anti-essentialist political argument. Cronenberg's
film, however, attempts to situate this critique within the
traditions of realist cinema, and thereby significantly
diminishes (and "simplifies") the Asian American perspective
of the play.
Taken collectively, these film adaptations, despite
moments of opposition, attest to the ideological limitations
that severely restrict the possibilities for complex Asian
American self-representations in the realm of popular cinema. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16220 |
| Date | 09 1900 |
| Creators | Koskela, Jason |
| Contributors | Goellnicht, Donald, English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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