The Spectacle of the Other: Representations of Chinatown in Michael Cimino’s  Year of the Dragon  (1985) and John Carpenter’s  Big Trouble in Little China  (1986)

Selma Bidlingmaier graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a B.A. in Psychology in 2001. She continued her education at the University of Bayreuth where she received her M.A. in Anglophone Literature in 2003. Presently, she teaches at the Ruhr-University Bochum and works on her doctoral dissertation on the representations of Chinatowns (USA) as third spaces. Her research interests include Asian American literature, the socio-political depictions of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans in the Post-Exclusion Era, and popular cultural representations of Chinatowns in the twentieth century.

The Spectacle of the Other: Representations of Chinatown in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon (1985) and John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier

Abstract

Since the late nineteenth century, Chinatowns have always been portrayed on the silver screen as spaces of danger, spiritual and moral decadence, and 'otherness.' This paper examines the representations of Chinatowns in two movies released in the 1980s, Year of the Dragon (1985) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986), while addressing plausible reasons for the endurance and durability of the negative depictions of Chinatown.

Full Text:

HTML

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5283/copas.95

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.

Current Objectives of
Postgraduate American Studies

ISSN: 1861-6127