Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Flesler, Daniela | Vernon, Kathleen M. | Pérez Melgosa, Adrián | Labanyi, Jo | Woods Peiró, Eva.
Date
2017-08-01
Keywords
Ethnology | Chinese Diaspora | Modern Spanish Culture | Europe | Spanish Cinema | Spanish Literature
Department
Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78332
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
This dissertation examines representations of the Chinese in twentieth and twenty-first century Spanish cultural production. I argue that many internationally circulating models for representing the Chinese in the West have been re-imagined in Spanish texts in ways that respond to cultural and economic anxieties particular to modern Spain. Adopting a cultural studies approach, this project reads a wide range of texts including film, literature, television, news media, magazines, and visual culture. This project is divided into three chapters, which address the imaginary Chinese, the Chinese migrant, and the Chinese Spaniard. The first chapter focuses on the cultural legacy of representations of the Chinese in Western cultural production, examining the ways in which orientalist discourses such as the “Yellow Peril” and the “Chinatown Myth” have permeated the Spanish imaginary. I argue that Spain’s uneven modernization during the early twentieth century reveals an ambivalent relationship with racial otherness. For example, the unofficial naming of Barcelona’s fifth district as “el Barrio Chino” in 1925 is indicative of a desire to construct within the city a cosmopolitan cultural capital. The chapter also reads representations of the film star Anna May Wong in Spanish film magazines and the serial appearances of the fictional Fu-Manchu character within Spanish cultural production, particularly in the work of novelist Juan Marsé. The second and third chapters deal more specifically with representations of the Chinese diaspora in contemporary Spain. In the second chapter I look at Chinese migrants as they are represented in Spanish literary and visual culture, including films like La fuente amarilla, Tapas, and Biutiful, and the novels Sociedad negra and Laberinto de mentiras. I argue that in these texts the Chinese are generally portrayed in terms of their economic roles and in ways that mitigate the economic anxieties of a Spanish audience dealing with a devastating financial crisis. The final chapter addresses texts by and about Spain’s growing generation of Chinese Spaniards. Through an analysis of texts such as the graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce and the documentary Generación Mei Ming, I explore how the Chinese community’s second generation interrogates established notions of Spanishness and highlights the reality of Spain’s increasing ethnic and cultural diversity in the twenty-first century. | 241 pages
Recommended Citation
Donovan, Mary Kate, "Imagining the Orient: Representations of the Chinese in Modern Spanish Culture" (2017). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3826.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3826