Overview
Working in the Chinese telephone exchange, a tourist landmark in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the Chinese women telephone operators were celebrated as “memory expert, linguist, and interpreter in one,” fluent in English and five Chinese dialects and carrying “2300 numbers in their heads.” Described in one instance as “Chinese flappers,” these fashionable switchboard operators appeared in newspapers, magazines, newsreels, postcards, celebrity photos, and Hollywood movies in early to mid-twentieth century, and their voices conversing in multiple languages could be heard over the radio. This talk traces the fleeting appearances of the Chinese telephone girls in an array of classical Hollywood feature films, where they are conjured to connect calls that serve pivotal narrative function or recruited to participate in the chorus line of switchboard montage sequences showcasing the expansiveness of the technological network. The talk presents archival research that reveals the Chinese telephone operators as operator-performers, who performed their labor of mediation for tourists and the camera, and whose images became stock materials to be appropriated and recycled in media networks and visual culture. Excavating the Chinese girl operators from the interstices of film history reorients our understanding of the visualization of modern media infrastructure where whiteness is the default, creating portals for alternative film historiography and theorization of media.
Speaker
Xin Peng is assistant professor in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK, and the former Managing Editor of Feminist Media Histories. She works at the intersection of American film and cultural history, media technologies, and Asian racial formation. Her research has appeared in Camera Obscura, Screen, The Velvet Light Trap, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Women Film Pioneers Project. She is currently writing a book-length media history of San Francisco’s Chinatown telephone exchange and its operators.
Details
This event will only take place in-person in the Gatsby Room (Chancellor's Centre).
Refreshments will be available.
Access
This event will take place in the Gatsby Room on the first floor of the Chancellor's Centre. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located each floor of the building.
Wolfson Humanities Society
The Humanities Society organises regular talks spanning a wide range of topics which take place every Tuesday during term time - please sign up to their mailing list to keep up to date with their upcoming events.
Image: from The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947).
