Date of Graduation

5-2026

Degree Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Advisor(s)

Eric Bianchi

Abstract

The 1930s through 50s were a pivotal time in Asian American history. Many Americans still held the hatred that drove the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, yet were also newly curious about China due to their alliance with the U.S. during World War II. Japanese Americans, in contrast, were labeled as wartime enemies and subjected to mass incarceration. Simultaneously, Asian Americans as a whole were often subsumed within stereotypical fascinations with “the Orient.” The nightclub industry in San Francisco Chinatown, which peaked from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, provides an ideal setting to analyze these shifting dynamics. Owned by Chinese American entrepreneurs and staffed by Asian American performers, the clubs afforded Asian Americans a degree of agency to negotiate their own identities and social positions. But situated in a hub for the Pacific Theater and frequented by white servicemen, they were also a prime site of racialization. Existing literature largely analyzes these dynamics within Edward Said’s 1978 framework of Orientalism, discussing the ways performers “self-orientalized” by leaning into stereotypes in order to fulfill, and capitalize upon, patrons’ expectations of performers’ foreignness. My work builds on this analysis by honing in on the way performers’ racialized bodies were literally—and often deliberately—reduced to commercial sexual objects through ornament and aesthetic value. I also analyze the music in these clubs, including its roots in Black American traditions, and examine the contrasting ways this era has been remembered—e.g. through a musical and several of its revisions that continue to negotiate Chinese American identity.

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