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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: William Gow, "Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Description: This episode features a conversation with Dr. William Gow on his recently published book, Performing Chinatown: Hollywood, Tourism, and the Making of a Chinese American Community (Stanford University Press, 2024), focuses on the 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles–its Chinatowns, and “city,” as well as the Chinese American community’s relationship with Hollywood. Chinatown and Hollywood, Gow argues, represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. As he will illustrate later in this conversation, Chinese Americans in Los Angeles used these performances in Hollywood films and in Chinatown for tourists to...