Report by Ruohan Wang, Master of Arts in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies ’26 at Duke University
On April 4, 2025, the workshop “Yellowface/Blackface: A Transnational Dialogue” was held at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. It was chaired by Carlos Rojas, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke and co-director of the DKU Humanities Research Center. Professor Rojas opened with four examples to frame the discussion. The first was Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s 2000 performance The Family Tree, in which he had calligraphers write Chinese characters in black ink across his face, which ultimately darkened into an almost completely black mask. Although intended to affirm Chinese cultural identity, a colleague of Rojas noted its visual resemblance to “blackface.” The second example was a 2013 incident at Duke, where the Kappa Sigma fraternity held an “Asia Prime” party that encouraged stereotypical Asian attire and imagery. The event sparked protests on campus and drew wide criticism. The third example highlighted the contrasting public reactions in 2015 to Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition and Rachel Dolezal’s racial passing as Black. The fourth example was Rebecca F. Kuang’s 2023 novel Yellowface, which tells the story of a white author who steals the manuscript of a deceased Chinese American writer and publishes it under a fabricated Chinese-sounding name. Following this thread of transnational, transgender, and transracial performance, the workshop featured presentations by Professor Esther Kim Lee, Professor Selina Lai-Henderson, and Professor Kimberly Hassel.
The first speaker, Esther Kim Lee, Professor of Theater Studies, International Comparative Studies, and History at Duke University, presented on “The Stage Chinaman and Clown Yellowface,” drawing from the first chapter of her 2022 book Made-Up Asians: Yellowface During the Exclusion Era. She began with an anecdote about 12-year-old Tad Lincoln watching a production of Aladdin on the night of his father’s assassination in 1865. This production included a character named Kazrac, a mute, comic Chinese slave, which Professor Lee identified as an early example of what she termed “clown yellowface,” that is, a racial caricature performed through physical comedy, acrobatics, and exaggerated gestures. Professor Lee argued that the figure of the “stage Chinaman” was not a reaction to Chinese immigration to the United States, but rather a British theatrical invention imported in the early 19th century. She traced its origins to British pantomime, particularly the performances of Joseph Grimaldi, and situated its emergence within a broader imperial context involving the exploitation of Chinese coolie labor. She emphasized that this figure was used to prefigure the Chinese body on stage as comic, strange, and disposable—so much so that, as she powerfully noted, “before Americans ever encountered a real Chinese immigrant, they had already laughed at a fictional one.”
The second speaker, Selina Lai-Henderson, Associate Professor of American Literature at DKU and co-director of the DKU Humanities Research Center, presented on “What Happens to Uncle Tom in Maoist China?”, drawn from her monograph in progress. Her presentation traced two key moments in the transnational reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in China: first, in the early 20th century, and later, during the Maoist era. Professor Lai-Henderson noted that the 1901 Chinese translation by Lin Shu and Wei Yi emerged at a time of national crisis. In this context, the novel was read as a political allegory, and the fate of enslaved African Americans became a cautionary tale for the Chinese. In contrast, the 1959 Maoist theatrical adaptation by Ouyang Yuqian radically transformed the story to align with revolutionary ideology. Among the key changes, Professor Lai-Henderson emphasized the re-centering of Uncle Tom, no longer as a Christian martyr but as a figure of revolutionary consciousness that could be mobilized in Maoist China, in alignment with a broader vision of Afro-Asian solidarity. In this way, Professor Lai-Henderson read theatre as a site of evolving Afro-Asian negotiations that allowed for racial crossings. “To look at Blackness, in other words, as an allegory on the stage,” she explained, “is to look at the degree to which Blackness—and also Whiteness—are performed, manipulated, and exhibited by Chinese performers […].”
The third speaker, Kimberly Hassel, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, presented on “Anti-Blackness and (Digital) Yellowface in the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Controversy,” developed from her co-authored paper “Stranger Than Fiction? Yasuke and the Assassin’s Creed: Shadows Controversy.” Her talk began by detailing the backlash to the release of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows in May 2024, which introduced two protagonists: Naoe, a female Japanese assassin, and Yasuke, a historically documented Black samurai who served under Oda Nobunaga. While critics accused the game of historical inaccuracy, anti-Blackness, misogyny, and ethno-nationalism, Professor Hassel pointed out the selective application of these critiques, especially given the franchise’s long-standing inclusion of supernatural and fictional elements, such as fighting the Pope or Egyptian gods. Moreover, Professor Hassel examined how digital technologies facilitate the circulation of racist rhetoric. She analyzed how machine translation and online anonymity enabled collaboration between far-right Japanese nationalists and international critics, illustrating how digital platforms allow racist ideologies to move fluidly across national and linguistic borders. As she asked pointedly, “Whose imagination decides who could be a samurai or a wizard? Why do some individuals insist that these identities are incongruent with Blackness?” In this way, Professor Hassel’s talk powerfully addressed the complex issue of representability in gaming culture within transracial, transnational, and transmedia contexts.
Following the three thought-provoking talks, which spanned over two centuries of cultural history, Professor Rojas initiated a panel discussion by inviting the speakers to reflect on the continuities and shifts in racial performance over time. Professor Lee emphasized the persistent nature of racial power structures, arguing that the logic of race has remained largely unchanged since the 19th century. Professor Lai-Henderson focused on the Afro-Asian contexts and addressed evolving attitudes toward Blackness in Chinese performances and everyday lives. Professor Hassel turned to the digital sphere, examining how online platforms have opened up new spaces for both racial discourse and discrimination. The conversation then opened to a lively audience Q&A, during which several probing questions extended the panel’s themes to issues of corporate interests and capitalist logic, media representation, and the ethical dimensions of racial performance. The workshop concluded with a sense of ongoing dialogue, as both panelists and audience (re)acknowledged the enduring complexity of racial representation across time and affirmed the need for continued critical engagement with these issues.
