Cinematic Chinatown - Detailseite

Roman Polanski's neo-noir Chinatown concludes with two haunting lines: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." But what precisely constitutes the elusive referent "it"? How did this racialized space—"China-town"—come to embody and calcify Western cinematic imaginaries of the inscrutable, menacing Other? This course examines the exoticized cinematic Chinatown from the early twentieth century through contemporary cinema, but more crucially, the counter-narratives that resist the colonial and orientalist epistemologies these films perpetuate.

Chinatown functions as an intersectional, racialized metaphor expressing the nation's desires, anxieties, and imperial aspirations, particularly during pivotal historical moments: the civil rights era, Cold War paranoia, the fraught "normalization" of Sino-American relations in the 1980s and the emergence of the model minority discourse. This spatial imaginary served as a repository for white America's deep-seated xenophobia and enduring suspicion of the Chinese Other within U.S. borders.

The course centers independent Asian and Asian American filmmakers whose works constitute acts of cultural resistance against these racist representational regimes. Drawing from frameworks in cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and Asian American studies, we examine how this corpus of films employs counter-hegemonic strategies to decolonize the cinematic gaze. These filmmakers rupture the empty signifier of "Chinatown," foregrounding the complex lived experiences, diasporic identities, and community formations that exceed and challenge dominant racist narratives of Asian American subjectivity. We will watch films including Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004), Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker’s Take Out (2004), and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (2019).