{"title":"After The Cheat","authors":"D. Miyao","doi":"10.5325/reception.14.1.0042","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n A discernible identity of the Japanese American film audience coalesced at a pivotal moment in the history of Japanese immigrants in the United States. That audience formed amidst a discrete event in early American cinema, the release of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in December 1915. The social construction of that audience emerged as a result of both the historical forces and the public discourses at work: 1) the social circumstances, particularly on the West Coast of the United States, involving intensifying racist thinking; and 2) the discursive event that was negotiated publicly as a controversial response to The Cheat in Japanese American publications. The production of a Japanese American film audience was inevitable by the mid-1910s, and The Cheat was the nodal point. Still, the public controversy over The Cheat in the important Japanese American newspaper Rafu Shimpo made the formation of such a filmgoing identity complicit and transparent.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.14.1.0042","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
A discernible identity of the Japanese American film audience coalesced at a pivotal moment in the history of Japanese immigrants in the United States. That audience formed amidst a discrete event in early American cinema, the release of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat in December 1915. The social construction of that audience emerged as a result of both the historical forces and the public discourses at work: 1) the social circumstances, particularly on the West Coast of the United States, involving intensifying racist thinking; and 2) the discursive event that was negotiated publicly as a controversial response to The Cheat in Japanese American publications. The production of a Japanese American film audience was inevitable by the mid-1910s, and The Cheat was the nodal point. Still, the public controversy over The Cheat in the important Japanese American newspaper Rafu Shimpo made the formation of such a filmgoing identity complicit and transparent.
期刊介绍:
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.