We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
This chapter studies Anna May Wong’s active construction of her international star/celebrity status through “greetings” to the world. My goal is to understand how she mobilized such “greetings” to retool the film and media apparatus into an empowering relation-building vehicle. I argue that her relation-building stems from multi-registered audience address in her “greetings,” which elicit divergent responses depending on the viewers’ lingua-cultural knowledge and sociopolitical consciousness. I dwell on two categories of “greetings”: scriptural “greetings” as illustrated in her signature in gifted photos, in Piccadilly (dir. E. A. Dupont 1929) and in a lithographic visual map showing the European cities she performed in from 1933 to 1934; and performative “greetings” as seen in her reiterative dialect performances in Hollywood on Parade A-3 (June 5, 1932) and the “China Mary” episode of an ABC Western TV show, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (aired on March 15, 1960). Methodologically, I depart from simply tracing Wong’s empirical reception to develop strategies of taking cues from Wong’s “greetings” so as to reactivate and parse out her ability to speak to audiences of disparate stances across history. This alternative lineage of performer-spectator dynamic deconstructs the race-gender ideology underpinning mainstream film and media, and harbingers a more self-reflexive interstitial identitarian position.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.