‘Chinatown’ and Global Operatic Knowledge

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 280-290
Author(s):  
Yvonne Liao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Southern Chinese ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Selection Of

In recent years opera studies have taken a distinctly global and migratory turn: Nancy Rao's Chinatown Opera Theater is a notable example. Rao's book sheds new light on the art form's transpacific networks, Cantonese immigrant communities and their highly racialised experience of everyday entertainment in early twentieth-century America, thereby ‘strip[ping] the veneer of exoticism from [southern] Chinese [i.e., Cantonese] opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience’. Still more illuminating is Rao's focus on the Chinatown theatre companies, their contracting of touring performers and their role in transoceanic commerce. Woven into the book is an intimately connected narrative of Cantonese opera in the 1920s, encompassing San Francisco, Vancouver, New York, Honolulu and (to a lesser extent) Havana. The selection of these locations is no coincidence, given their significance in the interwar years as port cities linked within imperial steamship networks, amidst the part-conflicting, part-intersecting agenda of dominant and emergent empires (for instance, Japan and the United States, in the case of the latter).

The Public Face of Chinatown: Actresses, Actors, Playwrights, and Audiences of Chinatown Theaters in San Francisco during the 1920s

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
NANCY YUNHWA RAO
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cantonese Opera ◽  
Interior Layers ◽  
Artistic Self

AbstractIn the twentieth century, elaborate and prosperous Chinatown theaters in New York and San Francisco (from the 1920s to the early 1930s) constituted a golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States, a vivid musical life that has been almost completely expunged from U.S. cultural memory. Seeking a historical narrative for this musical past—preserving those vivid sonorities and glamorous images that “threaten to disappear irretrievably”—entails an examination of the actresses, actors, musicians, and playwrights who enlivened the stages of these opera theaters, as well as the audiences who flocked to see them. In particular, this study sheds light on the significance of the performers named on the daily playbills and pictured in newspapers or on immigration bond papers. The images and sonorities extend beyond the bounds of the theaters to epitomize the Chinese community. The study not only offers a significant window into the interior layers of the music lives of Chinese America, but also reflects on the Chinatown community's sense of its musical and artistic self.

The “Japanese Turn” in Fine Dining in the United States, 1980–2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-54
Author(s):  
Samuel H. Yamashita
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
San Francisco Bay Area ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Further Training ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Wide Acceptance

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

scholarly journals A Comparison of Mental Health Outcomes in the United States and Italy at Different Levels of Cumulative COVID-19 Prevalence

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony D Mancini ◽  
Gabriele Prati
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ptsd Symptoms ◽  
General Distress ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
Low Prevalence ◽  
Different Levels

How does the prevalence of COVID-19 impact people’s mental health? In a preregistered study (N = 857), we sought to answer this question by comparing demographically matched samples in four regions in the United States and Italy with different levels of cumulative COVID-19 prevalence. No main effect of prevalence emerged. Rather, prevalence region had opposite effects, depending on the country. New York City participants (high prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than San Francisco (low prevalence). Conversely, Campania participants (low prevalence) reported more general distress, PTSD symptoms, and COVID-19 worry than Lombardy (high prevalence). Consistent with these patterns, COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with general distress and PTSD symptoms in New York than San Francisco, whereas COVID-19 worry was more strongly linked with PTSD in Campania than Lombardy. In exploratory analyses, media exposure predicted and mapped on to geographic variation in mental health outcomes.

The Snapshots of A. Thomas Nelson: A Case Study in the Preservation of Early 20th-century Vernacular Albums

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-193
Author(s):  
Stephanie Becker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Selection Of

Throughout the early 20th century, A. Thomas Nelson took snapshots while traveling the United States and Canada. His wife, Catherine Nelson, made a selection of these and placed them within eight photographic albums, later acquired by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Using one of these, “Snapshots from Travels in the United States and Canada (1904–1940),” as a case study, this article explores preservation practices for early 20th-century vernacular albums. While such albums are a valuable part of any collection, they present many complex preservation challenges due to the variety of materials contained within a single object. Critical questions about cataloging, digitizing, and rehousing methods guide decisions on how to stabilize the album's fragile condition and allow for access. This case study offers insight for collection managers and archivists who find themselves caring for similar snapshot albums.

Asian and Asian American Suburbs in the United States

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Zarsadiaz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Southern California ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Bay Area

Asians and Asian Americans are the most suburbanized people of color in the United States. While Asians and Asian Americans have been moving to the metropolitan fringe since the 1940s, their settlement accelerated in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. This was partly the result of relaxed US immigration policies following the 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Globalization and burgeoning transnational economies across the so-called Pacific Rim also encouraged outmigration. Whether it is Korean or Indian immigrants in northern New Jersey or Vietnamese refugees in suburban Houston, Asians and Asian Americans have shifted Americans’ understandings of “typical” suburbia. In the late 1980s, academic researchers and policymakers started paying closer attention to this phenomenon, especially in Southern California, where Asians and Asian Americans often clustered together in select suburbs. Sociologists, in particular, observed how greater Los Angeles’s economic, political, and built landscapes changed as immigrants and refugees—predominantly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, India, and Vietnam—established roots throughout the region, including Orange County. Since then, other studies of heavily populated Asian and Asian American ethnic suburbs—or “ethnoburbs”—have emerged, including research on New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. Nonetheless, scholarship remains focused on Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other hubs of the metropolitan West Coast. Research and scholarship on Asians and Asian Americans living in the suburbs has grown over the last decade. This is partly a response to demographic shifts occurring beyond the coasts. Moreover, geographers, historians, and urban planners have joined the discussion, producing critical studies on race, class, architecture, and political economy. Despite the breadth and depth of recent research, literature on Asian and Asian American suburbanization remains limited. There is thus much room for additional research on this subject, given a majority of Asians and Asian Americans in the United States live outside city limits.

Asian Americans in Opera: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Opera ◽  
American Composers ◽  
History Of

Chinese opera in America has several intertwined histories that have developed from the mid-19th century onward to inform performances and representations of Asian Americans on the opera stage. These histories include Chinese opera theater in North America from 1852 to 1940, Chinese opera performance in the ubiquitous Chinese villages at various World Fairs in the United States from 1890 to 1915, the famous US tour of Peking opera singer Mei Lanfang from New York to Chicago and San Francisco in 1930, a constellation of imagined “Chinese” opera and yellowface plays from 1880 to 1930, and the more recent history of contemporary opera created by Asian Americans commissioned by major opera houses. Some of these varied histories are closely intertwined, not all are well understood, and some have been simply forgotten. Since the mid-19th century, Chinese opera theater has become part of US urban history and has left a significant imprint on the collective cultural and historical memory of Chinese America. Outside of Chinese American communities arose well-known instances of imagined “Chinese” opera, yellowface works that employ the “Chinese opera trope” as a source of inspiration, or Western-style theatrical works based on Chinese themes or plotlines. These histories are interrelated, and have also significantly shaped the reception and understanding of contemporary operas created by Asian American composers and writers. While these operatic works of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are significantly different from those of earlier moments in history, their production and interpretation cannot escape this influence.

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