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3 books match the query 'Yellowface'

cover of Feeling Yellow: Asian Americans and Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Musical Theatre

Feeling Yellow

Asian Americans and Yellowface in Twenty-First-Century Musical Theatre

Donatella Galella

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Feeling Yellow examines how yellowface has persisted on the contemporary musical stage and how Asian Americans have contested yellowface, as they stake their own claim to the theatrical stage and nation state. Donatella Galella boldly argues that the pleasures of musical theatre and the disavowal of systemic anti-Asian racism enable the ongoing portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters by non-Asian actors. Galella offers two concepts to understand these phenomena: feeling yellow and yellowface without yellowed faces. Feeling yellow encapsulates the racialized anger, despair, and alienation of Asian American artists and audiences. Yellowface without yellowed faces denotes subtle ways of conveying Asianness, such as performing Asianness with exaggerated irony, using racialized costumes rather than yellow skin and slanted eye makeup, and setting musicals in fantasy Asian lands populated by multiracial casts. 

Galella utilizes musicals such as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes, The Mikado, and Soft Power, to understand how Asian and Asian American representation is connected to larger questions: How does racial identity shape emotional reactions to musical theatre? Why does yellowface and anti-Asian racism persist? What are the terms for Asian Americans belonging in the United States? Using a range of approaches from dramaturgy to auto-ethnography and materials from interviews to Reddit posts, Feeling Yellow spotlights Asian American affect, artistry, and activism.

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cover of Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era

Made-Up Asians

Yellowface During the Exclusion Era

Esther Kim Lee

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Made-Up Asians traces the history of yellowface, the theatrical convention of non-Asian actors putting on makeup and costume to look East Asian. Using specific case studies from European and U.S. theater, race science, and early film, Esther Kim Lee traces the development of yellowface in the U.S. context during the Exclusion Era (1862–1940), when Asians faced legal and cultural exclusion from immigration and citizenship. These caricatured, distorted, and misrepresented versions of Asians took the place of excluded Asians on theatrical stages and cinema screens. The book examines a wide-ranging set of primary sources, including makeup guidebooks, play catalogs, advertisements, biographies, and backstage anecdotes, providing new ways of understanding and categorizing yellowface as theatrical practice and historical subject. Made-Up Asians also shows how lingering effects of Asian exclusionary laws can still be seen in yellowface performances, casting practices, and anti-Asian violence into the 21st century. 
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cover of Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s

Yellowface

Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s-1920s

Moon, Krystyn R.

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Music and performance provide a unique window into the ways that cultural information is circulated and perceptions are constructed. Because they both require listening, are inherently ephemeral, and most often involve collaboration between disparate groups, they inform cultural perceptions differently from literary or visual art forms, which tend to be more tangible and stable.

In Yellowface, Krystyn R. Moon explores the contributions of writers, performers, producers, and consumers in order to demonstrate how popular music and performance has played an important role in constructing Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes. The book brings to life the rich musical period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, Chinese and Chinese American musicians and performers appeared in a variety of venues, including museums, community theaters, and world’s fairs, where they displayed their cultural heritage and contested anti-Chinese attitudes. A smaller number crossed over into vaudeville and performed non-Chinese materials. Moon shows how these performers carefully navigated between racist attitudes and their own artistic desires.

While many scholars have studied both African American music and blackface minstrelsy, little attention has been given to Chinese and Chinese American music. This book provides a rare look at the way that immigrants actively participated in the creation, circulation, and, at times, subversion of Chinese stereotypes through their musical and performance work.

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