The legend of the white-and-yellow black man: Global containment and triangulated racial desire in Romeo Must Die

Camera Obscura

Volumn 19, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 151-179

  Kim, James ^a,b  

^a POMONA COLLEGE   (United States)

^b FORDHAM UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950321685     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-19-1_55-151     Document Type: Review

References (51)

1. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996);
2. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999);
3. David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
4. For some exciting work in this direction, see Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
5. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon, 2001).
6. See also Journal of Asian American Studies 4.3 (2001), a special issue devoted to examining a variety of black and yellow intersections.
7. Tsui Hark's epic saga, Once Upon a Time in China, especially parts 1-3 (dir. Tsui Hark, 1991, 1992, and 1993).
8. On racial desire, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
9. On homosocial desire, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
10. Andrew O'Hehir, "Romeo Must Die," review of Romeo Must Die, Salon, 24 March 2000, available at www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2000/03/24/ romeo_must_die〉, accessed 9 November 2001.
11. For a Bakhtinian reading of Jackie Chan's persona as a parody of Hollywood action hero masculinity see Mark Gallagher, "Masculinty in Translation: Jackie Chan's Transcultural Star Text," Velvet Light Trap 39 (1997): 23-41. Thanks to Amelie Hastie for calling my attention to this essay.
12. Jeffery Paul Chan, introduction to The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, ed. Chan et al. (New York: Meridian, 1991), xiii.
13. Richard Fung, "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn," How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay, 1991), 148, 153.
14. Elsewhere, the Aiiieeeee! editors have described another stereotype of yellow masculinity: "Wonderful, effeminate, smart as a whip - [the Chinese man is] the image of failed white manhood gone moldy and repulsive," an emblem of "the failure of individual identity to measure up to 'accepted' or 'objective' or 'universal standards of morality and manhood.'" Frank Chin et al., preface to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Literature, ed. Chin et al. (1974; New York: Mentor, 1991), xvii.
15. For a useful survey of representations of Asians and Asian Americans in film, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
16. "Why Asian Guys Are on a Roll: Asian-American Men Were Told for Many Years by Their Own Community to Be Dutiful Sons," Newsweek, 21 February 2000, 50.
17. I borrow this witticism from Steve Fore, "Jackie Chan and the Cultural Dynamics of Global Entertainment," in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997), 240.
18. For a recent critique of cultural nationalism along these lines, see Eng, Racial Castration, 210-11.
19. In this respect, the movie appropriates the indeterminacy that many scholars have seen as characteristic of Hong Kong subjectivity. As Kwai-cheung Lo puts it, "the subject posited [in Hong Kong's body culture] is not always a definite, substantial entity but is rather a site of indeterminacy or an ambivalent space to be filled out with different historical contents." Kwai-cheung Lo, "Muscles and Subjectivity: A Short History of the Masculine Body in Hong Kong Popular Culture," Camera Obscura 39 (1996): 109.
20. Lo's essay is particularly apposite to an examination of kung fu cinema. For other treatments, see Rey Chow, "Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing," Diaspora 2.2 (1992): 151-70;
21. Ackbar Abbas, "Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City," Public Culture 6.3 (1994);
22. Ackbar Abbas, "The New Hong Kong Cinema and the Déjà Disparu," Discourse 16.3 (1994): 65-77. Thanks to Amelie Hastie for drawing my attention to this body of research.
23. See also Susan Gubar, Racechanges: Whale Skin, Blackface in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
24. For an analysis of some ways in which Sedgwick's triangle can function not simply to establish male-male erotic bonds but also to facilitate acts of racial domination and resistance, see Susan Fraiman, "Geometries of Race and Gender: Eve Sedgwick, Spike Lee, Charlayne Huntyer-Gault," Feminist Studies 21.1 (1994): 67-82.
25. Brian Locke, "Three's a Crowd: The Racial Triangle of 'White,' 'Black,' and 'Asian' Men in Post-World War Two United States Culture" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2000).
26. See also Brian Locke, "'Top Dog,' 'Black Threat,' and 'Japanese Cats': The Impact of the White-Black Binary on Asian-American Identity," Radical Philosophy Review 1.2 (1998): 98-125.
27. The terms of this continuum, of course, are dictated by the needs of a white male racial imaginary. As Eric Lott has taught us in his study of the nineteenth-century blackface minstrel show, white masculinity has historically coped with its troubled racial fantasies in part by projecting various schizophrenic images of black masculinity. Isaac O'Day occupies what is ostensibly the salutary middle ground of this continuum, but insofar as he remains defined by the terms of the white male racial imaginary, he hardly represents a liberatory option for black masculinity. For a classic critique of these racial stereotypes, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 170.
28. Kwang Chung Kim and Shin Kim, "The Multiracial Nature of the Los Angeles Unrest in 1992," in Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans, ed. Kwang Chung Kim (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 25-26.
29. See also Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the 1992 LA Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
30. Sumi K. Cho, "Korean Americans vs. African Americans: Conflict and Construction," in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 203-4.
31. On the two narratives of the uprisings, see Cho, "Korean Americans vs. African Americans," 203-4.
32. For other critiques of these scapegoating narratives, see Elaine Kim in the same volume, "Home Is Where the Han Is," 221,
33. Lie and Abelmann, "The 1992 Los Angeles Riots," in Koreans in the Hood, ed. Kwang Chung Kim, 75-87.
34. For an account of the downturn in the Hong Kong movie industry, see David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 61-81.
35. See also Fore, "Jackie Chan and the Cultural Dynamics of Global Entertainment," 239.
36. On the international cult of Hong Kong cinema, see Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong, 82-97.
37. For a useful chart of Hong Kong-Hollywood crossover films, see Hank Okazaki, "Hank's 'Hong Kong to Hollywood' Charts," available at www.duke.edu/web/film/intr001/, accessed 1 March 2002. There were, of course, earlier Hong Kong-Hollywood crossovers (e.g., Bruce Lee in the 1970s, as I will discuss below, and Jackie Chan in the 1980s), and several figures have either returned to Hong Kong or work simultaneously in Hong Kong and Hollywood. Thanks to Amelie Hastie for bringing up this point.
38. Gary Dauphin, "The Mob Gets Deep in Ghost Dog," review of Ghost Dog (dir. Jim Jarmusch, Japan/US/Germany/France, 1999),
39. Tasha Turner, "Heads Up!" Vibe, April 2000, 154;
40. "China," Vibe, September 2000, 184.
41. On the popularity of classic kung fu films with hip-hop audiences, see Lance Mannion, "Chop Socky," Rap Pages, October 1998, 21.
42. On the Wu-Tang Clan's video game, see Jason Wilson, "Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style," Rap Pages, November 1999, 35.
43. Stuart M. Kaminsky, "Kung Fu Film as Ghetto Myth," in Movies As Artifacts: Cultural Criticism of Popular Film, ed. Michael T. Marsden et al. (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1982), 140.
44. Bill Brown, "Global Bodies/Postnationalities: Charles Johnson's Consumer Culture," Representations 58 (1997): 33.
45. For additional accounts of the 1970s reception of Hong Kong kung fu films, see Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, 126-49;
46. David Desser, "The Martial Arts Film in the 1990s," in Film Genre 2000, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 103-8;
47. Amy Abugo Ongiri, "'He Wanted to Be Just Like Bruce Lee': African Americans, Kung Fu Theater, and Cultural Exchange at the Margins," Journal of Asian American Studies 5.1 (2002): 31-40.
48. Desser, "The Martial Arts Film in the 1990s," 104, 105.
49. Brown, "Global Bodies/Postnationalities," 36. Brown sees Bruce Lee's "remasculinizing counternation" as only one half of the dialectic of kung fu culture. In his view, the cinematic commodification of kung fu ultimately also displaced "any sustained attraction to the radical postnationalizing imagination" in the post-Vietnam moment (36). Insofar as his argument locates this displacement historically after Bruce Lee's breakthrough year, however, his findings are consistent with my own.
50. Desser, "The Martial Arts Film in the 1990s," 106.
51. Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).