The life and death of a Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the politics of cross-ethnic performativity

Philip Ahn (1905--1978) was a pioneering Korean American screen icon who portrayed a diverse cross-section of roles in over 200 films and television programs, from Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto pictures of the 1930s to such 1970s series as Kung Fu and M*A*S*H. This dissertation focuses on his career as an anchoring case study while addressing representations of Asians and Asian Americans within broader historical, industrial, and cultural contexts.; Constituting a critical biography of Philip Ahn, Chapter One explicates the actor's centrality in shaping a diasporic cultural space of transnational Korea in American popular media as well as mediating communiques between Hollywood and the South Korean film industry through his political connections to the parental homeland (as the son of celebrated national leader Tosan An Ch'ang-ho). Borrowing the theories of masquerade, Chapter Two uses selected textual examples in which Ahn speaks Korean while playing Chinese roles to address the relationship between ethnic passing and bilingual, bicultural spectatorship. Chapter Three explores the political and publicity discourses surrounding the construction of the Philip Ahn-Anna May Wong romantic couple in two Paramount 'B' films: Daughter of Shanghai (1937) and King of Chinatown (1939). Chapter Four demonstrates that Hollywood's "China films" of the 1930s were at the heart of diplomatic tensions and negotiations between the U.S. State Department and the Nanking government. The industry's depiction of China became more tightly controlled during World War II with the intervention of the Office of War Information. Using a wide range of archival documents, the chapter examines the combined influence of the federal and Chinese governments in the production, distribution, and exhibition of China-set films (in particular, RKO's China Sky [1945], in which Philip Ahn plays his first Korean role). Chapter Five offers an overview of the Korean War genre as well as an in-depth analysis of Douglas Sirk's Battle Hymn (1957). Ahn's onscreen mutability between South Korean ally and North Korean enemy is yet another indication of his versatile and vacillating identity. The dissertation closes with ruminations on the actor's paternal screen persona, which carries palimpsestic traces of his real-life father.