TY - JOUR
AU - Oda, Meredith
AB - Denise Khor’s Transpacific Convergences reveals diverse worlds of Japanese American leisure, recreation, and community building almost entirely new to the historiography: Japanese film exhibition and viewership, a migrant film industry, transpacific circuits of filmic culture from Japan and the Philippines, Hollywood employment. These worlds unfold against transformations in the Hollywood and Japanese film industries, while Khor also highlights parallels with Black race films to frame out her story. Transpacific Convergences illuminates Japanese migrant film culture, as well as the “radical heterogeneity within American film historiography” and the long lineage of Asian American independent cinema (p. 3). Khor uses creative methodologies to analyze films no longer in existence and reanimate ephemeral publics. As she points out, most of the Japanese migrant films from this period no longer exist. She therefore digs in archives for the stories of producers, exhibitors, and theater owners, but she also trawls ethnic newspapers for ads, reviews, and coverage that she reads for audience participation. Khor also uncovers an early gem: the 1914 The Oath of the Sword, perhaps the oldest surviving Asian American film and a rare example of early Japanese American filmmaking. (She is working with its archive and a museum to restore the film.) Transpacific Convergences is divided into four crisp chapters detailing dimensions of Japanese American film culture. The first explores attempts to shift the Japanese American screen image. Beginning with organized protest against the 1915 film, The Cheat, and its Japanese villain, and continuing with migrant film companies, Khor shows how Japanese Americans used film for positive representation and racial uplift. The second chapter traces the circuitous routes of film exhibition. She explores theater operations as ethnic businesses, sanctuaries from segregation, and outlets for migrant-produced films and Hollywood productions. The chapter really shines in its discussion of the travels and practices of benshi, itinerant film exhibitors who narrated silent films in theaters, church halls, or open fields all over the country. A profession that came from Japan and lasted well into the sound era, benshi could be celebrities themselves and provided entertainment, education, propaganda, and support for community institutions. The third chapter narrates the sound transition for viewers and the film industry. The transition offered new opportunities and barriers for Japanese Americans in the industry, while also expanding a divide between Hollywood and Japanese or Japanese American film companies. The final chapter explores Japanese-owned theaters as site of encounters. Japanese owners courted Filipino working-class patrons they also stigmatized, while Filipinos used the theaters as cheap lodgings and community institutions to counter the virulent anti-Filipino racism of Depression-era California. As she makes clear throughout, Khor’s story of Japanese American cinema is a history that was lost through incarceration, unpreserved films, overlooked industries, and archival gaps. But this is also a history of visibility, community, and redistribution, one she hopes offers tools to “reformulate the possibilities for our futures,” in media and activism (p. 145). © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights)
TI - Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II. By Denise Khor
JF - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whad025
DA - 2023-01-24
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/transpacific-convergences-race-migration-and-japanese-american-film-BWcEWcfCvT
SP - 182
EP - 183
VL - 54
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -