Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom [Paperback]

"Fascinating ... an exceptionally rich and provocative study of race and national imagery at the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry."--Richard Pena, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University "This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough--and complex--treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao's placing of Hayakawa's stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity "[O]ffer[s] important new opportunities to develop our understanding of the transnational history of Hollywood cinema. From the vantage point of the particular systems of production, representation and reception concerning the deployment of East Asian actors within American narrative filmmaking, [it] uncover[s] valuable insights into Hollywood's global strategies during a time of enormous political upheaval and cultural change regarding the construction of American self-identity and the USA's attitudes to its East Asian citizens and neighbours. [Miyao] write[s] impressively from 'within' in order to stage...understanding of the ambivalent status...of Americanization and modernization...The way that Miyao comes to...his remarkable nuanced analysis is by arguing that, like his screen persona more generally, Hayakawa embodied a mobile middle-ground between Orientalized and Americanized modes of performance...Miyao also allows us to see a more complex set of negotiations being staged within the distinctive transnational cultural force-field that Hayakawa occupied during his heyday within the Hollywood system...It is the unique achievement of Miyao's book that we are able to visualize the vectors especially of this first aspect of Hayakawa's stardom for the first time. By examining the Japanese-American Japanese-language press and by also discussing the critical reception of Hayakawa's films within his home country, Miyao intensifies the complexion of his history in a substantial way...propose[s] a vital contribution to the current reconceptualization of Hollywood cinema within the framework of modern international film studies." Alastair Phillips, Screen 2008, issue 49

Daisuke Miyao is Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Oregon. He is a coeditor of Casio Abe's "Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano" and a co-translator of Kiju Yoshida's "Ozu's Anti-Cinema."