Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan

This essay analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 2007-10, Vol.122 (5), p.1463-1481
Main Author: Rzepka, Charles J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Asian Americans
Biggers, Earl Derr
Chinese culture
Chinese languages
Detective fiction
Fiction
Hawaiian
Literary criticism
Literary genres
Literature
Movies
Novels
Prototypes
Race
Racism
Regionalism
Stereotypes
White people
Writers
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Summary:This essay analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres of locale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key, challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invoking a counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book's plot followed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highly formulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known as rule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre's very tendencies toward racism to undermine racist stereotypes.
ISSN:0030-8129
1938-1530
DOI:10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1463