Off-White

Reviews / Votes

Illuminates the voicing of characters and creation of places in literature and film that play to Western constructions ... Provides important insight into the changing nature of orientalist discourses ... Graduate students and scholars interested in both cultural studies and literature should find many of the ideas that Ma has put forth to push the conversation about the constructed nature of race in new directions. * China Quarterly * Off-White is an extraordinarily-learned study of how English-speaking writers, artists, and filmmakers have told stories of China from a Chinese viewpoint. By meticulously analyzing plots, language, and characters through literary, linguistic, philosophical, and psychological lenses, and challenging many long-held beliefs along the way, Sheng-mei Ma provides a remarkable volume, deeply thought-out, full of information, and highly readable. * John A. Lent, Professor Emeritus of Mass Communication, Temple University, USA * This superb book charts Anglo-American fiction's enduring--and enduringly maladroit--fascination with Chinese cultural identity, from The Good Earth's propagation of 'Chinglish' to Hollywood's lamentable history of 'yellowface' casting. Off-White gets to the heart of those chronic Orientalist stereotypes that refuse to die, showing how they resurface in the most surprising of fictional contexts. * Gary Bettinson, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, Lancaster University, UK, author of The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai: Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance (2014) and editor of Asian Cinema * In Off-White, Sheng-mei Ma takes the reader through a hall of ethnically-framed mirrors that reveal the contortions of sinophilic/sinophobic images broadcast in a prodigious range of English-language media. Ma's perceptive decoding and brilliant comparison of Orientalist motifs and themes through historical, linguistic, and Freudian analysis convincingly explain how the vagaries of racism in Asian stereotypes have evolved and persist in popular culture. * Patricia Haseltine, Professor of English, Providence University, Taiwan, and co-editor of Doing English in Asia: Global Literature and Culture (2016) *