Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture [Hardcover]

Robert G. Lee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 22, 1999

Sooner or later every Asian-American must deal with the question 'Where do you come from?'. It is probably the most familiar if least aggressive form of racism. It is a tip-off to the persistent notion that people of Asian ancestry are not real Americans, that 'Orientals' never really stop being loyal to a foreign homeland, no matter how long they or their families have been in this country. Confronting the cultural stereotypes that have been attached to Asian-Americans over the last 150 years, Robert G. Lee seizes the label 'Oriental' and asks where it came from. The idea of Asians as mysterious strangers who could not be assimilated into the cultural mainstream was percolating to the surface of American popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese immigrant laborers began to arrive in this country in large numbers. Lee shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to all Asian-Americans, coalescing in particular stereotypes. Whether represented as Pollutant, Coolie, Deviant, Yellow Peril, Model Minority, or Gook, the Oriental is portrayed as alien and a threat to the American family the nation writ small. Refusing to balance positive against negative stereotypes, Lee connects these stereotypes to particular historical moments, each marked by shifting class relations and cultural crises. Seen as products of history and racial politics, the images that have prevailed in songs, fiction, films, and nonfiction polemics are contradictory and complex. Lee probes into clashing images of Asians as (for instance) seductively exotic or devious despoilers of (white) racial purity, admirably industrious or an insidious threat to native laborers. When Lee dissects the ridiculous, villainous, or pathetic characters that amused or alarmed the American public, he finds nothing generated by the real Asian-American experience; whether they come from Gold Rush camps or Hollywood films or the cover of "Newsweek", these inhuman images are manufactured to play out America's racial myths. Orientals comes to grips with the ways that racial stereotypes come into being and serve the purposes of the dominant culture. Robert G. Lee is Associate Professor of American Civilization, Brown University.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Edward W. Said noted in his groundbreaking study, Orientalism, the Asian is the eternal "other." Asian Americans, whether immigrants or native born, are subject to a variety of overlapping stereotypes that label them as "not American." What is "American" and what is not is defined in part by popular culture. In Orientals, Robert G. Lee analyses a broad range of artifacts of American pop culture--from silent films to blockbuster movies, popular magazines to pulp fiction, and stage dramas to 19th-century songs--to reveal the history of these definitions.

Lee identifies six representations of Asian Americans--the pollutant, the coolie worker, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook--and notes how, when, and why they emerged. As Lee notes, "each of these representations was constructed in a specific historical moment, marked by a shift in class relations accompanied by cultural crisis." For example, the image of the subservient "coolie" emerged as an undercutting threat to the developing white working class in the 1870s and 1880s, while the image of the Asian as model minority appeared in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s and was held up to African Americans and Latinos as a "successful case of 'ethnic' assimilation" and a model for nonpolitical upward mobility. Well illustrated throughout, Lee's impressive study uses the Asian American experience as a window through which to examine what makes a person a "real" American. Orientals is an excellent addition to the scholarly literature. --C.B. Delaney

From Library Journal

Lee (American civilization, Brown Univ.) presents six images of "the Oriental": pollutant of white culture, coolie laborer, effeminate deviant, yellow peril threat, model minority, and gook. Lee identifies these images by reviewing a wide range of popular American literature, including films, folktales, and songs from late 19th-century California to the present day. Scholars as well as general readers will be interested in Lee's identification of the conservative "racial bigot" and the "national racial liberal." Readers may wonder why he does not place into perspective popular fiction such as Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (LJ 2/15/89) or the movie Dim Sum, instead focusing on the enduring historical sterotypes represented by Flower Drum Song, Fu Manchu, and The World of Suzie Wong. Still, Lee does an excellent job with the historical material. Highly recommended for both academic and public libraries.?Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Oak Park, IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 271 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (March 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566396581
• ISBN-13: 978-1566396585
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #926,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Popular Culture and the History of Racism, March 15, 2001

By 

Tanja M. Laden (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Paperback)

Robert G. Lee eloquently and effectively illustrates how the construct of race in America operated to perpetuate racist notions towards Asian American immigrants. The history of ascribed racism towards Asian Americans had its roots in the mid 19th Century, and it operated under an American system of placing cultural meaning on the body. Racist notions toward Asian Americans were created chiefly to solidify the American sense of nationality and cohesion that was absent, and needed in order to facilitate American identity. Lee examines how racist ideas were perpetuated and transmitted through popular culture in the "six faces of the Oriental," the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook. These caricatures implied that all Asian Americans fell in to one of six categories, and this stereotyping precluded most Asian Americans from functioning as individuals in American society. Systematic "typing" of the Asian Americans in America, Lee argues, functioned to maintain systems that were larger and more socially driven. These complex social practices were not lost on many Asian Americans, however, and many Asian Americans consistently challenged the unfair ideology of a nation that at once promoted individuality while denying the right to that individuality though six invariable types. Lee cleverly illustrates how each of the six types gave meaning to the Asian body by showing how each stereotype functioned at different periods in America's history. America's first encounter with the Asian Americans quickly led to the idea that they were "pollutants" in their religious practices, or were, as Lee calls them, ""Heathen Chinee' on God's Free Soil." The alien body of the Asian American subsequently served as a system of white working class identity in the "coolie." As "deviants," the Asian Americans challenged not only racial but gendered ideas as well, and the forced prostitution of Chinese women prior to arriving to America led them to become a sexualized threat. Apparent as threats to Victorian ideas of domesticity and gentility, sexuality perpetuated the Chinese women' subservience not only to men but women as well. As the "yellow peril" Asian immigrants represented a larger anxiety towards all immigrants. Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 publication, The Rising Tide of Color was a pseudo-scientific rally to abort Asian immigration, claiming that the Asian immigrants were a racial threat to American society and thus their presence was indeed a "peril." The "model minority" during the Cold War functioned through the financial success of the Asian immigrants, establishing them as a veritable consumer market. The "model minority" gave birth to the "gook," which was actually a response to America's eventual de-industrialization after the Cold War. At this point, according to Lee, America continues to racialize Asians as "Orientals," through allusions to the previous six typecastings as well as newer forms of racial categories complexly tied to economics. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture is at once an excellent social history of Asian immigrants in America as well as a cultural history of American racism, and its questions lead to examining the problems and faults with the latest "oriental" category.

15 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Identity and Association, March 1, 2000

By 

"claremonde99" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Hardcover)

This text is an interesting overview to the constant redefinition that society has in creating and labeling the term "Asian". I do not believe that the author chose to title the book "Orientals" as a derogatory term, rather as a word that has been misconstrued within western ideology. The title itself brings attention to the constant shift and misrepresentation of Asians within Westernized culture.

Being Asian American alone is no longer enough it seems within society. Most individuals currently label themselves as Filipino-American, Vietnamese-American, Korean-American, Indian-American, etc. The whole notion of how a large group such as Asians identify themselves nowadays is too large, and complicated of a subject to discuss in a literary commentary such as this one. I do admit that word "Orient" is a term that has been used to label goods and products; it is a term that misrepresented whole nations of people. But one has to remember too that its origins derive from a period and society that considered people of color, and foreign locals as "goods" rather than people or individuals.

In reference to this text, it is an informative text but not one of the best published. I would suggest Fanon, (Stuart) Hall, Spivak, and Trinh if one were interested in searching about Diaspora and identity.