Guest Lecture Philippa Gates (Wilfrid Laurier University)
The influx of Chinese immigrants to America to build its cross-continental railroads in the nineteenth century incited a social panic in the face of the perceived “yellow peril,” which resulted in various laws that restricted immigration. Along with, or perhaps inciting, that social panic came the over-reporting of Chinatown crimes in American newspapers and the disproportionate number of American films that aligned Chinese immigrants with crime. Feature films as early as 1915 exploited “yellow peril” fears about Chinese people and Chinatown communities. These fears were mined in a variety of genres, including social melodramas, crime films, and westerns. In this talk, Professor Philippa Gates will discuss the ways in which Chinese immigrants were initially criminalized in films (from tong wars and slave girls to opium dens and alien smuggling), but eventually embraced as desirable citizens with the coming World War II and during the Civil Rights era.
Philippa Gates is Professor in Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. Her recent publications include Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas (2011) and Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film (2011), as well as articles on gender, race, and age in Hollywood genre films various journals and edited collections. Her current book project is entitled Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans in Classical Hollywood Film.
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at