Sean Metzger, “Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race” (Indiana UP, 2014)

New Books in Asian American Studies · Dec 28, 2014 · 1h

Sean Metzger‘s Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana University Press 2014),examines how, in the past 150 years, China was rendered legible to Americans through items of clothing and adornment. Professor Metzger offers a rich and detailed study of Chinese fashion, calling it the “Sino/American interface” that marks political and cultural investments in America’s views of China and Chinese Americans. Professor Metzger does this by providing a cinematic and performance-based cultural history of four iconic objects: the queue, or man’s hair braid; the woman’s suit or the qipao; the…