UC San Diego

This dissertation explores the vibrant world of motion picture amusements in Asian immigrant communities in the United States between 1900 and 1945. It traces a circuit of movie-going that spanned from the migrant cities of Seattle and Stockton to the rural plantation towns of the Hawaiian islands. Starting in the nickelodeon era, Japanese showmen crafted a world of cheap attractions in major spots of Asian migration and settlement in the transpacific West. The cultural politics of first generation elites, alongside their struggles with local and national communities, shaped these entertainment spheres. Racial segregation, alien land laws, and prewar governmental surveillance also demarcated the possibilities for a viable public culture during the first half of the twentieth century. In Hawaii, the cultural sphere of movie-going emerged in relation to sugar planters, Japanese showmen, and the thousands of immigrant laborers who crowded into the show houses to view a diverse program of moving pictures from Hollywood as well as Japan and the Philippines. With the first major labor strike in 1909, sugar planters sought to promote the movies on plantations as a means to appease labor unrest and create a docile labor force. With the increasing threat of organized labor, however, sugar planters grew increasingly distrustful. I trace the apprehensions and anxieties that planters exhibited over the movies, the showmen, and their spectators in order to suggest that this film scene comprised an alternative sphere in rural Hawaii. Beyond simple pleasures, the dangers of Japanese run amusements extended a counter public for laborers beyond the union hall and into the world of leisure and attractions. This study of early film culture in Asian immigrant communities brings together the field of film studies with Asian American history, U.S. social and cultural history, migration studies, and urban studies. It sheds insight into the ways that race, labor, and migration formed the public sphere of the cinema in the first decades of its inception. The project illuminates how the social experience of the movies, and the engagement with the pleasures and fantasies of the cinema, shaped the relationships of Asian immigrants to both their national communities and American modernity