5:28 p.m., June 2, 2008--Peter X Feng, UD associate professor of English and women's studies, will be hosting a film series, "Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film," on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) every Tuesday and Thursday night in June. Feng will be giving introductions with TCM's host, Robert Osborne. About 40 movies are scheduled to be shown in the series, running about eight hours each show night.

The TCM series, which runs through June 26, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will provide an extensive, in-depth look at how Asians are depicted on film. The festival is similar to TCM's highly successful 2006 look at African-American images in film and its 2007 examination of gay images in film.

Feng, editor of Screening Asian Americans, a collection of essays, said assembling a series about Asian images was a challenge when compared with a series of films by African-Americans.

“With African-American films, you start with a history of African-American performers,” Feng said, “With films about Asians or Asian Americans, it was common for roles to be played by white actors, so tracking performers wasn't really an option. Instead, I tried to look for the kinds of stories that Hollywood returned to repeatedly, like the 'Madame Butterfly' story, and pick out some interesting variations in different decades.”

Feng said that the series is heavily weighted to Chinese and Japanese subjects, mostly because China and Japan were represented more frequently than other countries before 1960.

“Americans just weren't aware of Korea or Southeast Asia,” Feng said of the period before 1960. “It was actually very hard for us to choose an American film that represented a Vietnamese perspective, as opposed to an Oliver-Stone American-experience-in-Vietnam sort of film. It was also a very difficult decision whether to focus on South Asian stories of India and Pakistan. Ultimately, we decided we could tell a more coherent story by focusing on East Asia.”

Feng received his bachelor's degree in American studies from Yale University and his master's degree and doctorate in film studies from the University of Iowa. He was Chancellor's Distinguished Visiting Professor of Film Studies at UC-Irvine from 1997-98 and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Asian American Studies.

"One of the main reasons I agreed to do the series is that I feel not enough people know that UD has great courses in film studies, ethnic studies and East Asian studies," Feng said. "I am currently working on a book on Asian Americans and television, so this was a valuable opportunity for me to get a peek behind the curtain. I'm particularly interested in what happens in the board rooms at a big company like Turner, and I got a glimpse of that."

Feng has published articles in Cinema Journal, Cineaste, Amerasia Journal, Jump Cut and elsewhere. He is the author of Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (2002), published by Duke University Press.

Feng teaches courses in theory, Asian American literature and film studies. Recent courses include "Sex and Violence in Asian American Literature," "Texts and Contexts: Movies, Novels, Comics," "The Hollywood Musical," and the graduate seminar "Narrating Race, Narrating Nation."

Turner Classic Movies, currently seen in more than 75 million homes, is a 24-hour cable network from Turner Broadcasting System Inc., a Time Warner company. TCM presents motion pictures from the largest film library in the world, the combined Time Warner and Turner film libraries, from the 1920s through the 1990s, uncut and commercial-free.

The film schedule is as follows:

Tuesday, June 3
Silent Films

8 p.m.--The Cheat (1915) followed by Filipinos Retreat From Trenches (1899)
9:45 p.m.--Broken Blossoms (1919)
11 p.m.--The Dragon Painter (1919)
12 a.m.--Mr. Wu (1927)
1:45 a.m.--The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1932)

Thursday, June 5
Anna May Wong

8 p.m.--The Toll of the Sea (1922)
9 p.m.--Old San Francisco (1927)
10:45 p.m.--Piccadilly (1929)
12:45 a.m.--Daughter of the Dragon (1931)
2 a.m.--Shanghai Express (1932)

Tuesday, June 10
Asian Crime Fighters & Detectives

8 p.m.--Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
9:30 p.m.--Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)
10:45 p.m.--The Scarlet Clue (1945)
12 a.m.--Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937)
1:15 a.m.--Daughter of Shanghai (1937)

Thursday, June 12
Pearl S. Buck

8 p.m.--The Good Earth (1937)
10:30 p.m.--Dragon Seed (1944)
1 a.m.--China Sky (1945)
2:30 a.m.--First Yank Into Tokyo (1945)

Tuesday, June 17
The Legacy of World War II

8 p.m.--Go for Broke! (1951)
9:45 p.m.--Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
11:15 p.m.--The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956)
1:30 a.m.--Walk Like a Dragon (1960)

Thursday, June 19
Interracial & Intercultural Romance

8 p.m.--Bridge to the Sun (1961)
10 p.m.--China Doll (1958)
12 a.m.--Sayonara (1957)
2:30 a.m.--The World of Suzie Wong (1960)

Tuesday, June 24
Race Consciousness and the Civil Rights Era

8 p.m.--The Crimson Kimono (1959)
9:30 p.m.--The Mountain Road (1960)
11:30 p.m.--Flower Drum Song (1961)
2 a.m.--Enter the Dragon (1973)

Thursday, June 26
Contemporary Asian Images

8 p.m.--Rush Hour 2 (2001)
10 p.m.--The Joy Luck Club (1993)
12:30 a.m.--The Killing Fields (1984)
3 a.m.--Mr. Baseball (1992)

For more information on the films, visit [www.tcm.com/thismonth/article.jsp?cid=196827].

Article by Martin Mbugua