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)

Authors

  • Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.95

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.

Author Biography

Selma Siew Li Bidlingmaier

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.

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How to Cite

Bidlingmaier, Selma Siew Li. “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)”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 8, Mar. 2012, doi:10.5283/copas.95.

Issue

Vol. 8 (2007)

Section

Articles

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Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.