{"id":43894,"date":"2015-11-11T03:01:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T03:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=43894"},"modified":"2017-03-25T01:23:29","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T01:23:29","slug":"race-and-the-modern-exotic-three-australian-women-on-global-display","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=43894","title":{"rendered":"Race and the Modern Exotic: Three \u2018Australian\u2019 Women on Global Display"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race and the Modern Exotic: Three \u2018Australian\u2019 Women on Global Display<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Monash University Publishing<\/a>
\nOctober 2011
\n180 pages
\nPaperback ISBN: 9781921867125
\neBook ISBN: 9781921867132<\/a><\/p>\n

Angela Woollacott<\/strong><\/a>, Manning Clark Professor of History
\nThe Australian National University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Annette Kellerman<\/a>, Rose Quong<\/a> and Merle Oberon<\/a> were internationally successful \u2018Australian<\/a>\u2019 performers of the first half of the twentieth century. Kellerman was a swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star, Quong an actor, lecturer and writer who forged a career in London<\/a> and New York<\/a>, and Oberon one of the most celebrated film stars of the 1930s and 1940s, first in London and then Hollywood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Through her international vaudeville<\/a> performances and film roles, Kellerman played with the quasi-racial identity of South Sea Islander<\/a>. Quong built a career based on her own body, through a careful appropriation of Orientalism<\/a>. Her body was the signifier of her Chinese authenticity, the essentialist foundation for her constructed, diasporic Chinese identity. The official story of Oberon\u2019s origins was that she was Tasmanian<\/a>. However, this was a publicity story concocted at the beginning of her film career to mask her lower-class, Anglo-Indian<\/a> birth. Despite anxious undercurrents about her exoticism, Australians were thrilled to claim a true Hollywood star as one of their own.<\/p>\n

These three women performers created newly modern, racially ambiguous Australian femininities. Racial thinking was at the core of White Australian culture: far from being oblivious to racial hierarchies and constructions, Australians engaged with them on an everyday basis. Around the world, \u2018Australian\u2019 stars represented a white-settler nation, a culture in which white privilege was entrenched, during a period replete with legal forms of discrimination based on race. The complex meanings attached to three successful \u2018Australian\u2019 performers in this period of highly articulated racism thus become a popular cultural archive we can investigate to learn more about contemporary connections between race, exoticism and gender on the global stage and screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Annette Kellerman, Rose Quong and Merle Oberon were internationally successful \u2018Australian\u2019 performers of the first half of the twentieth century. Kellerman was a swimmer, diver, lecturer, and silent-film star, Quong an actor, lecturer and writer who forged a career in London and New York, and Oberon one of the most celebrated film stars of the 1930s and 1940s, first in London and then Hollywood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16,1245,11,8,17,4405,6462,25],"tags":[21851,21848,986,21846,21850,21849],"class_list":["post-43894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-asia","category-biography","category-books","category-media-archive","category-monographs","category-oceania","category-passing-2","category-women","tag-angela-woollacott","tag-annette-kellerman","tag-australia","tag-merle-oberon","tag-monash-university-publishing","tag-rose-quong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43894"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51776,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43894\/revisions\/51776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}