MISREADING THE CHINESE CHARACTER: IMAGES OF THE CHINESE IN EUROAMERICAN DRAMA TO 1925.(Review)

MISREADING THE CHINESE CHARACTER: IMAGES OF THE CHINESE IN EUROAMERICAN DRAMA TO 1925. By Dave Williams. Asian Thought and Culture No. 40. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. $54.95

In Misreading the Chinese Character, Dave Williams analyzes a series of plays written for performance in the United States which feature one or more Chinese characters. Williams begins his study with the first such play, Arthur Murphy's The Orphan of China, presented in Philadelphia in 1767, and terminates it in the mid-1920s when "the rise of the cinema greatly and permanently weakened the stage as a site of image production." As his title suggests, the author indicts the playwrights for having misread and purposely misrepresented true Chinese character--though he admits that "representing the Chinese with complete accuracy, even had the Euroamericans desired to do so ... would have been impossible."

For the theoretical underpinnings of his study, Williams turns to Edward Said, from whom he adopts the perspective of "the Other" marginalized by representatives of the hegemonic …