{"id":225,"date":"2025-12-07T23:08:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T04:08:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/?p=225"},"modified":"2025-12-07T23:08:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T04:08:56","slug":"orientalism-ornamentalism-brownface-yellowface-in-old-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/orientalism-ornamentalism-brownface-yellowface-in-old-hollywood\/","title":{"rendered":"Orientalism, Ornamentalism, Brownface\/Yellowface in Old Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Something that immediately stuck out to me while watching <\/span>Lawrence of Arabia <\/span><\/i>was Alec Guinness\u2019s performance as King Faisal and Anthony Quinns\u2019 performance as Auda abu Tayi. While both actors were both obviously caucasian, both took lengths to appear more Oriental, with Guinness darkening his lashes with mascara and Quinn going as far to wear a fake nose prosthetic and darken his skin with dye. This was, of course, done instead of casting any native actors in major roles for the production. This immediately brought to mind a related study on the usage of yellowface in older Hollywood films (adjacent to this topic but still overall connected through the theory of Orientalism) that I had encountered in another class, particularly through the case study of Anna Mae Wong.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anna Mae Wong, the first Asian American actress to make it to big Hollywood, often starred in Orientalized and hypersexualized roles in major blockbuster productions such as \u201cDaughter of the Dragon,\u201d and \u201cThe Thief of Baghdad\u201d (the latter, interestingly, takes place in Baghdad where an entirely white cast plays Muslims while Anna Mae Wong plays the ambiguously Asian and scantily clad slave). She is situated in the unique position of being both a pioneer and a perpetrator\/opportunist, as while she did open the doorway for Asians in Hollywood, she did so through an Orientalist lens. Notably, she was also passed up the main female lead O-Lan in <\/span>The Good Earth <\/span><\/i>in favor of a yellowface Luise Rainer, a film that snagged both best picture and best actress at the Oscars in 1938. Anna Mae Wong introduces an offshoot on Said\u2019s <\/span>Orientalism<\/span><\/i> \u2014 Anne Anlin Cheng\u2019s <\/span>Ornamentalism<\/span><\/i>, an essay that defines ornamentalism as a \u201cconjoined presences of the oriental, the feminine, and the decorative.\u201d With this definition there is a clear implication of the loss of power: if a woman is to be so drastically associated with an aesthetic that she \u201clive[s] as an object,\u201d then she must, by association, have the same power as that object. In essence, she lacks agency. Her presence is admired, yet it holds little power.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anna Mae Wong perfectly fit into the framework of ornamentalism, and the legacy of Eastern representation can be understood through a relative comparison. Guinness and Quinn play Middle Eastern characters, but their power is excused by the fact that they are, ultimately, white. The same can be said of Peter O’Toole, but flipped. This can also be applied off the screen: Lawrence is neither a woman or Oriental, but it is fascinating that he is coded under both identities. His struggle with homosexuality, both inner and outer through other people’s perceptions, as well as his familiarity with the Bedouin, complicates his legacy as a man of great agency.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something that immediately stuck out to me while watching Lawrence of Arabia was Alec Guinness\u2019s performance as King Faisal and Anthony Quinns\u2019 performance as Auda abu Tayi. While both actors were both obviously caucasian, both took lengths to appear more Oriental, with Guinness darkening his lashes with mascara and Quinn going as far to wear … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Orientalism, Ornamentalism, Brownface\/Yellowface in Old Hollywood”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6527,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,5,9,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colonial-fantasies","category-desire","category-feminism","category-gender","category-masculinities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6527"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/gss206-f25\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}