From Hollywood's "Yellow Perils" to Zhang Yimou's "Red Trilogy"
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COLLABORATIVE ORIENTALISM: FROM HOLLYWOOD‘S ―YELLOW PERILS‖ TO ZHANG YIMOU‘S ―RED TRILOGY‖ Xiaodong Liu A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ART IN LITERATURE May 2010 Committee: Khani Begum, Advisor Erin Labbie ii ABSTRACT Khani Begum, Advisor Cultural hegemony is not a set of theories or academic disciplines confined within the scholarly circle or philosophical sphere; nor is it being created to make Europeans feel good or superior. It is, in fact, a very practical means to gain control over the Other politically, economically and culturally. In a way, it is a crucial complementary aid to the military and political powers of Europeans. But how can European powers maintain their cultural hegemony after all of the former colonies have gained their independence? By exploring Edward Said‘s theory of Orientalism as well as Robert Young‘s Postcolonialism, this thesis proposes that cultural hegemony with its cultural values has never ceased to be an integral part of European dominance, and it continues to exercise its power even after decolonization. Both Said and other post-colonial theorists emphasize that Orientalism or cultural hegemony is a discourse between the West and the Rest. It is therefore a two-way traffic: a collaboration, either consciously or unconsciously, of the recipients of cultural hegemony. The study of Orientalism should not only focus on how the West uses different measures to gain control over the Rest, but also should examine how the recipients react to cultural hegemony. The author of this thesis provides a comparative study of the practice of cultural hegemony through an analysis of films produced by directors from both the West and East, namely D. W. Griffith in the U.S. and Zhang Yimou from China aiming in order to explore why cultural hegemony not only lingers in the post-colonial era, but can also be discerned among those who were colonized. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Khani Begum for her guidance and support of my study and research, her patience and enthusiasm, her professional expertise as well as the space she left for me to work in my own way. Without her timely guidance and persistent help, this thesis would not have been possible. I also want to thank Dr. Erin Labbie, the committee member, for her encouragement, assistance and insightful comments, which demonstrated to me the importance of the connection between postcolonial theory and film studies pertaining to my thesis. In addition, my sincere gratitude goes to Dr. Xiao-ming Yang, a professor of English at Ocean County College as well as a visiting professor at my university, Xi‘an International Studies University, who introduced me to Edward Said‘s theory Orientalism, and whose knowledge as well as enthusiasm for Cultural Studies has had great influence and lasting effect. The assistants in Jerome Library provided sufficient help and support I needed to complete my thesis, and I‘d like to offer my thanks to them as well. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, my husband, my son, my sisters and brother, for assisting me throughout my life and career. Without their love and support, I simply could not complete my study here at Bowling Green State University in the US. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I. LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................ 9 CHAPTER II. THE ―YELLOW PERILS‖ IN HOLLYWOOD .................................................. 22 CHAPTER III. EXOTICISM IN SCARLET: ZHANG YIMOU‘S ―RED TRILOGY‖ ............. 46 CHAPTER IV. THE GREY REALITY IN ZHANG YIMOU‘S REALITY FILMS ................ 67 CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION .................................................................................................... 80 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................... 83 Liu 1 INTRODUCTION The term postcolonialism in its current usage began to gain popularity in the late 1980s when a whole array of literary theories began to surface. The term itself is a bit hard to define because it is somewhat controversial. It does not simply refer to the literal meaning of postcolonial, the period after colonialism. Rather, it can be related to what occurs or exists in both the period of colonization and the era after decolonization. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin regard the term postcolonial as applying to ―all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day‖ (2). The economically advanced nations, mainly in the West, habitually set up rules, standards and models to evaluate others and themselves, which becomes an ever-lasting legacy of colonialism-----the domination of the West over the world in terms of knowledge and culture. Therefore, postcolonialism insists that economic development should be inextricably connected with cultural decolonization. In such a sense, issues of cultural dominance are regarded as an important perspective of postcolonilaism, which functions in a way as a theoretical framework that destabilizes the domination of the West. To challenge the legacy of colonialism, Postcolonialism, as a literary theory, covers literature produced in the once colonized countries, especially those of the European colonial powers, and it also includes literature of the colonial countries. The early works of postcolonial theories are Frantz Fanon‘s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. In these works, the author, born in the French colony of Martinique, supports the opposition to French colonialism and advocates the ideas of decolonization in the areas of philosophy, social science and literature. A landmark work in this area, Said‘s Orientalism, published in 1978, sets the stage thematically and theoretically for postcolonial studies. Said was born in Jerusalem, and served as Liu 2 the American spokesman for the Palestinian cause for many years. Being influenced by the writings of American linguist Noam Chomsky and French philosopher Michel Foucault, Said, in this monumental work, explores how "the West," in particular Britain, France, and North America, produces knowledge about ―the East,‖ and thereby exerts power. Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts: the West and the East or the Occident and the Orient; in fact, this is an artificial boundary which is laid on the basis of the concept of us and them. The model of this division is what Said termed Orientalism, through which the Europeans define themselves as the superior race by producing the Orient as irrational, depraved, childlike and thus, different. Such an image created a bias in the western attitude to the East, which can be widely found in Orientalists as well as in their scientific research and literary works. To the extent that Western scholars were aware of contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture, these were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist, brought into reality by them, or as a kind of cultural and international proletariat useful for the Orientalist's grander interpretive activity. (Said, 208) In a way, Orientalism deconstructs Eurocentrism and fundamentally changes the way of scholarship in the west, especially in the fields related to history, philosophy, and culture. A prominent group of scholars who gained their currency from an engagement to Said‘s work are Third World writers such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. In his book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues that the post-colonial world should valorize spaces of mixing. He deploys concepts of mimicry, interstices and hybridity to demonstrate that cultural production is productive when truth and authenticity give way to ambivalence. ―It is not the colonialist Self or the colonized Other, but the disturbing distance in-between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness‖ (Bhabha, 45). He further challenges the western production of Liu 3 binary oppositions, defined traditionally as center and margin, civilized and savage, enlightened and ignorant. Along with Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak is another influential scholar in this area. She employs double negatives as a way to describe her own distinct take on postcoloniality. Spivak regards hegemonic structures, either economically or culturally, as empowering as well as impoverishing. She elaborates these hegemonic structures as spaces one cannot want to inhabit but which one tries to change. The double negative indicates that for postcolonial, culture is an indispensible element of a desired future, and it is also an embarrassed sign of one‘s former and later colonization. Other scholars under the influence of Said are the authors of The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (1989). By examining postcolonial literature from the Indian Subcontinent, Australia, North America, the Carbbean and African nations, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin probe into the relationship between the colonizers‘ culture and that of the colonized, between the process of conquering and subjugating indigenous cultures and the process of indigenous culture being obliterated. They also contemplate their