Critical Media Literacy in Interdisciplinary Spaces: Teaching and Learning about China

Representations of China, and the Chinese, have been present in the media since the mid-19th century. The question of the “assimilability” of the Chinese during the early period of Chinese immigration (1850s-1882) played out through a “selection of cultural representations” (Tchen, 1999, p. 265). Associations of the Chinese eating rats, cats, puppies, etc. had been circulating in children’s books since the mid-19th century, and these associations were then commercialized to sell products, which served to perpetuate a particular primitivism of the Chinese. Tchen (1999) argues that the association of the Chinese eating rats was an “undeniably powerful image in the Victorian imagination” (p. 266). More significant, however, was the power of this particular representation as “not only a manifestation of public opinion, but also as having the power to forge a coherent working-class and middle-class consensus about Chinese exclusion and containment.” While this presentation will not address at length the history of representations of China in the media, it will explore more contemporary representations of Asia/ns in popular culture. The series of clips are intended to build out discussions of race, class, and gender, and to explore the normalization and entrenchment of orientalist narratives