Transpacific Convergences

Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II By Denise Khor. Despite the rise of the Hollywood system and hostility to Asian migrant  communities in the early twentieth-century United States, Japanese  Americans created a thriving cinema culture that produced films and  established theaters and exhibition companies to facilitate their  circulation between Japan and the United States. Drawing from a  fascinating multilingual archive including the films themselves, movie  industry trade press, Japanese American newspapers, oral histories, and  more, this book reveals the experiences of Japanese Americans at the  cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, exhibition,  and spectatorship. In doing so,Denise Khor recovers previously unknown  films such as The Oath of the Sword(1914), likely one of the  earliest Asian American film productions, and illuminates the global  circulations that have always constituted the multifaceted history of  American cinema.  Khor opens up transnational lines of inquiry  and draws comparisons between early Japanese American cinema and Black  cinema to craft a broad and expansive history of a transnational public  sphere shaped by the circulation and exchange of people, culture, and ideas across the Pacific.  Paper: 208 pp.