The Transpacific Color Line: Cold War Asian and Asian American Radio, Film, and Music

Abstract

The transpacific color line is a dialectical construction, one that brings to the fore the bodily realities and constructed nature of racial formation in the context of Asian and Asian American cultural scenes centering the various media ecologies of radio, film, and music. With a focus on the historical and cultural conditions of the Cold War period, it looks to local sites in North America as indexes of not only transpacific immigration and media circulation, but also the racial liberalist policies which shaped the urban geographies in which these cultural moments were situated. In doing so, this project highlights the fundamental role of empire in the forced and voluntary dispersion of Asian diasporas through the triangulation of power between the United States, Asian America, and Asia. At the same time it also elucidates the frictions in popular media as they became integral to but also an illusory part of the cultural scenes associated with Chinese/Chinese American but more broadly Asian/Asian American engagement in postwar California. The case studies examined span roughly the 1940-70s and trace the geographical displacement of nonwhite populations which was orchestrated by American efforts at communist containment globally. Each chapter examines a different media cultural scene that pulls into focus how race/ethnicity as a process of racial formation was brokered with and against colonial and capitalist empire—what I understand as the color line. Chapter One examines the local and transnational radio networks of Golden Star Radio, the first Chinese-language station in North America. Chapter Two looks at the history of the Sing Lee Theatre, the first theater built expressly for Chinese-language film and entertainment in postwar Los Angeles. Chapter Three builds on the former by examining theatrical and nontheatrical films centering travel to the effect that they reveal divergent views on new Asian/Asian American mobilities across the transpacific. Chapter Four centers the Japanese American-led band scene at the heart of Asian American life in postwar California. In these myriad minoritarian histories, I am also invested in the blurring of distinctions between area and ethnic studies to the effect that unconventional historiographical methods of counter-narration and counter-archiving are essential to work on these ephemeral cultural scenes.