Whitewashing and Racebending: Diversity in Literature and Popular Culture (Nemla 2018)

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H-Announce Whitewashing and Racebending: Diversity in Literature and Popular Culture (NeMLA 2018) Announcement published by Rafael Ponce-Cordero on Monday, June 26, 2017 Type: Call for Papers Date: September 30, 2017 Location: Pennsylvania, United States Subject Fields: Popular Culture Studies, Film and Film History, Race Studies How has it been progressive or restrictive to change the race or ethnicity of a character in adaptations of literature and other texts? How do such choices in character design and casting increase diversity? How do such choices perpetuate problematic legacies from the source material? Examples may include stage, film, and fan productions of novels, plays, and comics. This year saw whitewashing of Asian characters from comics, as in Doctor Strange and Ghost in the Shell, as well as missed opportunities to re-cast Danny Rand in Netflix’s adaptation ofIron Fist and expunge the white savior narrative that has plagued that kung-fu comic. This panel will examine diversity beyond these adaptations of comics and consider whether and how popular culture in general addresses limited diversity in literature, especially in casting choices for adaptations, and what makes such adaptations effective or ineffective in addressing such real-life problems. Additional examples we anticipate submitted abstracts will consider include whitewashing in adaptations of religious texts such as Exodus, adaptations of video games such as Prince of Persia, adaptations of animated series such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, and adaptations of real-life stories such as 21. We will also consider progressive work accomplished in racebending, in stage adaptations such as Harry Potter and Hamilton, fan productions such as cosplay, and, returning to comics, adaptations such as The Flash, Supergirl, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Please submit 300-word abstracts and brief biographical statements bySeptember 30, 2017 directly through NeMLA's system:https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16951 The 49th Annual NeMLA Convention will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on April 12-15, 2018. Contact Info: Rafael Ponce-Cordero, Keene State College Contact Email: [email protected] URL: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16951 Citation: Rafael Ponce-Cordero. Whitewashing and Racebending: Diversity in Literature and Popular Culture (NeMLA 2018). H- Announce. 06-26-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/184662/whitewashing-and-racebending-diversity-literature-and-popular Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1.

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Century Cinema?
chapter 11 Cosmopolitan Pleasures and Affects; or Why Are We Still Talking about Yellowface in Twenty- First- Century Cinema? Felicia Chan Introduction1 Yellowface and cinema share their roots in the theatre. Writing about yellow- face performance in the 19th century, Sean Metzger (2004: 628) argues that the ‘Chinaman’ fetish ‘substitutes for and conceals the dominant anxieties about Chinese immigrants among the white majority in the late 1800s [in America]’, and the ‘Chinaman character serves as a vessel, encapsulating a range of anx- ieties produced by white concerns over the presence of Chinese people in the United States social and economic order’ (ibid.: 643). Indeed, yellowface per- formed as camp and comic representation via the racial impersonation of East Asian peoples (not only Chinese) by way of caricature extended well into the 20th century – Mickey Rooney’s short- tempered, buck- toothed and heavily be- spectacled Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961) still jars (Ito 2014) – and also as figures of fear, such as the Fu Manchu figure in numer- ous books, films, television programs, comics and radio. Jill Lane (2008: 1730) suggests that ‘racial impersonation – acting in the name and place of the other through such practices as blackface, redface, yellowface, cross- dressing, and drag – has played a particularly important role in the imagination and aesthet- ic articulation of national communities across the Americas’. Yellowface is now, by and large, perceived as an offensive and unacceptable practice, yet it persists, even in films as recent as Cloud Atlas (Lana Wachowski 2012), in which actors Hugo Weaving and Jim Sturgess have their facial features altered with prosthetics to appear ‘Asian’ in the film’s fictional ‘neo- Seoul’ city (Le 2012).
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