Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture by David C. Oh (review)

Abstract

David C. Oh’s Whitewashing the Movies: Asian Erasure and White Subjectivity in U.S. Film Culture (2021) is an imaginative, paradigmatic examination of big-budget films from 2008–2018. Like studies by Arthur Berger, Robert G. Lee, Kent A. Ono, and Vincent N. Pham, Whitewashing the Movies tracks oppositions and meaning making in the casting choices for Asian, Indigenous Hawai’ian, and mixed-race characters. Provoked by intensified racial tensions post-2016, Oh’s work deconstructs racial oppression and privilege through an understanding of Whiteness (capitalized as “a particular discursive strategy that normalizes White racial hegemony”) and how it perpetuates Asian erasure in cinema (9). Inspired by Afrofuturism’s ethos of centering Black lives in narratives free from systemic oppression and by the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to value undervalued lives, Oh proposes we “imaginatively [correct] the representational problem of whitewashing” in cinema (20). Quite literally, the modals of possibility (can, could, may, might, would) permeate every chapter as Oh both invites readers and challenges industry to dream “what if?” This eagerness to consider different representational possibilities, Oh claims, helps bring Asian American studies “into the realm of scholarly imagination” (21). One of Oh’s stated goals is to add to what Brian Hu called a “relative dearth of literature about Asian American cinema since the early 2000s” (44). Building upon the scholarship of Richard Dyer and Gina Marchetti, Oh declares that Hollywood needs a “bold, ideological counterattack that says people of color can be anything” (158). The counterattack that Oh champions is different from simple colorblind casting in that it is strategic, purposeful, and corrective; casting Simu Liu as King Arthur would be a resistive and revolutionary move, not just a simple choice in which race were not considered.