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Jane Chi Hyun Park's Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Hollywood Cinema distinguishes itself from many other scholarly writings on Hollywood's imaginary representation of East Asia and Asian people in at least two respects. First, through the analysis of background settings, rather than the foreground mise en scène and performances explicitly displaying oriental themes, this book explores the ways in which Asian bodies, objects, and images sometimes have become hypervisible and other times are rendered invisible in America's popular culture. Second, Yellow Future examines the ways in which East Asia has been increasingly linked to futuristic and technologized subjects in a range of Hollywood movies produced since the 1980s. Diverting readers' attention from Hollywood's imaginary narrative of East Asia's long history, past and cultural myth, Park therefore identifies a new trend in Hollywood cinema in an era characterized by cybernetic communication, globalization and multiculturalism.
Clearly, Yellow Future has been greatly influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism. Whilst Park recognizes that the post-1980s cinematic representation of Asian tropes and themes in Hollywood movies has deviated from earlier more explicit stereotypical depictions of East Asia and Asian people, she,...