A book chronicling the 1939 visit of famous movie star Anna May Wong to Australia, coupled with a contemporary design project - new lucky shoes for the star - written and curated by University of Melbourne based senior lecturer Derham Groves.

Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood's best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant's difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. Born in Los Angeles in 1905, she was the second daughter of seven children born to a laundryman and his wife. Childhood experience fueled her fascination with Hollywood. By 1919 she secured a small part in her first film, The Red Lantern, and she continued to act up until her death. Her most famous film roles were in The Toll of the Sea, Peter Pan, The Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco, and Shanghai Express. But discrimination against Asians, in both in the film industry and society, was commonplace, and when it came time to make a film version of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, she was passed over for the Chinese female lead role, which was ultimately given to the white actor Luise Rainer. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in Los Angeles's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood's pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

One of the Atlantic's "Books to Get Lost in This Summer" Best Books of August 2023: New York Times Book Review, Christian Science Monitor, InsideHook, BookRiot, WNET AllArts, Arlington Magazine A trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—“Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy. As Huang shows, Wong’s rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including a smitten Walter Benjamin and (an equally smitten) Marlene Dietrich. Challenging the parodically racist perceptions of Wong as a “Dragon Lady,” “Madame Butterfly,” or “China Doll,” Huang’s biography becomes a truly resonant work of history that reflects the raging anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, and ageism toward women that defined both Hollywood and America in Wong’s all-too-brief fifty-six years on earth.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong's cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.

The standard image of the Raj is of an aloof, pampered and prejudiced British elite lording it over an oppressed and hostile Indian subject population. Like most caricatures, this obscures as much truth as it reveals. The British had not always been so aloof. The earlier, more cosmopolitan period of East India Company rule saw abundant ‘interracial’ sex and occasional marriage, alongside greater cultural openness and exchange. The result was a large and growing ‘mixed-race’ community, known by the early twentieth century as Anglo-Indians. Notwithstanding its faults, Empire could never have been maintained without the active, sometimes enthusiastic, support of many colonial subjects. These included Indian elites, professionals, civil servants, businesspeople and minority groups of all kinds, who flourished under the patronage of the imperial state, and could be used in a ‘divide and rule’ strategy to prolong colonial rule. Independence was profoundly unsettling to those destined to become minorities in the new nation, and the Anglo-Indians were no exception. This refreshing account looks at the dramatic end of British rule in India through Anglo-Indian eyes, a perspective that is neither colonial apologia nor nationalist polemic. Its history resonates strikingly with the complex identity debates of the twenty-first century.

“Out of the Ordinary is one part unembellished documentation and one part verbi-visual equivalent of a Pro Hart work made with nineteenth-century, paint-loaded canons. It is a cultural history, resource for contemporary designers, imaginarium and luminous almanac of an explorer of the stranger species of creativity – from brick art to letterboxes, junk mail, mail art, television, fashion, food, model trains, Disney’s imagineering, amusement parks, feng-shui, Postmodern architecture, human-scale craftsmanship, forgotten Australian architects in China, famous architects (that, perhaps, should be forgotten save for their bow ties), collectors of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia, outsider artists and clients – and none of these things exactly. Everywhere Derham Groves attends to and finds significance in the minutiae of everyday life, inter-association, and those things that affect us so profoundly but remain just outside the purview of the ‘normal.’ And in these things – objects, art, architecture, environment(s) – he finds stories and teaches his reader how to do the same. Out of the Ordinary is also a motivational text. It begins with bricks, perhaps the most standardized and repeatable units of construction, and reveals how they can be used as vehicles for unfettered creativity and not merely for the creation of containers. Groves shows how art and architecture can emerge and receive nourishment from the garbage of the everyday and creative collisions. Groves also calls, albeit subtly, for a turn away from homogeneity, the standardized, and unimaginative or ‘lazy’ design informed by principles of economy, efficiency, utility and function conceived in abstraction. Rather, Groves celebrates the reanimation and/or rejuvenation of place by the makers of anything out of the ordinary (who don’t necessarily pray to the demiurge of good taste) who have created spaces and things through which the creative imagination shines.” – Dr Andrew Chrystall, School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey University

'Full of warmth, humour, optimism and sometimes painful honesty' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE 'Anyone who's ever struggled to make sense of who they are and where they belong should read this book' NADIA WHITTOME MP 'An important voice of our generation' PARMINDER NAGRA 'This guy has better Punjabi than both of us and he's only half Punjabi.' Only. Half. I stared at those words. The intent behind the comment was in no way malicious, but it hurt. I felt diminished. I felt like I was being robbed of something essential to me. And as I stared at my screen, realisation dawned. '#bothnothalf' I replied. For over twenty-five years, actor Jassa Ahluwalia described himself as 'half Indian, half English'. His fluent Punjabi always prompted bewilderment, medical staff questioned the legitimacy of his name, and the world of casting taught him he wasn't 'the right kind of mixed-race'. Feeling caught between two worlds, it wasn't long before Jassa embarked on a call to action: we need to change how we think and talk about mixed identity. By delving into the media we grew up consuming and the legacies of empire we have been taught, Ahluwalia asks: is there anything to be learnt from Rudyard Kipling? Why were movie stars urged to hide their mixed identities? To what extent did colonialism encourage or hinder mixed marriages? Is nationalism outdated? How can the politics of class and queer liberation inform our understanding of mixed identity? Both Not Half is a rallying cry for a new and inclusive future. It's a journey of self-discovery that unearths the historical roots of modern mixed identity as we know it, braving to deconstruct the binaries we have inherited and the narratives we passively accept. Part-memoir, part-manifesto: this is a campaign for belonging in a divided world.

Australian Western in the Fifties: Kangaroo, Hopalong Cassidy on Tour, and Whiplash looks at Australian Westerns from three points of view—film, personal appearance, and television at the beginning, middle, and end of the 1950s, the American Western’s golden age. It looks at three significant but “forgotten” cases: (1) Kangaroo: The Australian Story, the first Technicolor film made in Australia, produced by the Hollywood movie studio 20th Century Fox, directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lewis Milestone, starring Maureen O’Hara, Peter Lawford, and Richard Boone. (2) The successful goodwill tour of Australia by the Hollywood actor William Boyd who played the film, radio, and television cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. (3) The British-American produced black-and-white TV series Whiplash, made in Australia and starring the Hollywood actor Peter Graves. The American filmmakers’ ignorance of Australia meant they learned the hard way there was more to Australian Westerns than simply replacing the prairie with the bush, bison with kangaroos, and Native Americans with Aboriginals. Indeed, the depiction of place and the presentation of Aboriginal culture are two of the most intriguing aspects of Australian Westerns. In retelling the filmmakers’ stories, a unique picture of the Australian film and television industry and everyday life during the 1950s is revealed.

“Derham Groves has written this illuminating story of an exceptional but hitherto unsung Australian architect whose distinctive designs in China as well as his homeland may still be seen and enjoyed. In this book Groves has for the first time revealed some characteristic strands of Arthur Purnell’s talents, whereby his subject’s remarkable creativity is now clear for us to enjoy.” - Robert Irving, architecture historian and pupil of Arthur Purnell Arthur Purnell’s ‘Forgotten’ Architecture: Canton and Cars focuses on two early phases in the career of the much overlooked and underrated Australian architect, Arthur Purnell (1878–1964). In 1903, Purnell teamed up with the American engineer, Charles Paget (1874–1933) in Canton, China. Between 1903 and 1910, Purnell and Paget designed many important and impressive buildings, including the Arnhold, Karberg & Co. building (1907), one of the first reinforced concrete buildings in Southern China, and the South China Cement Factory (1907), which would later become the headquarters of Dr. Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), the first president of the Republic of China. Not many architects can design a cement factory fit for a president’s palace! When Purnell returned to Australia in 1910, he had to start again from scratch. As cars were taking over from horses in a big way, he saw that designing for cars would be the next big thing in architecture. The fledgling Australian car industry was full of colourful, larger-than-life characters like Col. Harley Tarrant (1860–1949), who built his first car in 1897 and Australia’s first petrol-fuelled car in 1901, and Alec Barlow Sr. (1880–1937), the archetypal dodgy car salesman. Purnell wanted in, designing many buildings for both men, including early car factories and car showrooms. In this unique book, Groves asks: why isn’t Arthur Purnell more famous?

This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of women’s lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny. Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class. Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come to recognize Australia as a crucial site within the ‘Cantonese Pacific’, and this collection provides a new layer of gendered comparison, connecting women’s experiences in Australia with those in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. ‘Locating Chinese Women is a path-breaking book. By exploring the experiences of Chinese Australian women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors have opened new and compelling avenues of inquiry about the history of Chinese Australian women. In this landmark work, they have brilliantly recast the history of Chinese Australia.’ —Joy Damousi, Australian Catholic University ‘Locating Chinese Women breaks new ground in Australian and transnational Chinese women’s history by making the lives of remarkable Chinese Australian women visible. Photographs, testimonies, Chinese-language newspapers, and digitized archives help document the women’s agency and activities as they navigate public lives between and within Australia and China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.’ —Shirley Hune, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Washington