Marchetti, Gina

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Marchetti, Gina

PERSONAL:

Education: Florida State University, B.A., 1976; Northwestern University, M.A., 1978, Ph.D., 1982.

ADDRESSES:

CAREER:

Professor and writer. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, visiting assistant professor, 1983-84; University of New Hampshire, Durham, assistant professor in department of theatre and communication, 1985-86; University of Maryland, College Park, assistant professor in department of radio, television, and film, 1986-92, associate professor in comparative literature program, 1987-96; University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, instructor in the department of comparative literature.

MEMBER:

Asian Cinema Studies Society (founding member, 1984; executive board member, 1984-92), Society for Cinema Studies, University Film and Video Association, Association for Asian Studies, Association for Asian American Studies, Asian American Arts and Media of Washington, DC.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Association of Asian American Studies Annual Book Award, 1995, for Romance and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction.

WRITINGS:

Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2006.

(Editor, with Tan See Kam) Hong Kong Film, Hollywood, and the New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island, Routledge (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gina Marchetti has taught film and communication courses at a number of American universities, and currently teaches in the comparative literature department at the University of Hong Kong. Her interest in the depictions of Asians and Asian culture in movies led to her first book, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction. Asserting that films do more than entertain, Marchetti offers examples of various twentieth-century films to compare how Asians were represented in film over the decades. Robert Sklar maintained in a Cineaste review that the book "weaves its film analysis together not only with historical events, such as America's Asian wars, but also with exemplary critical and theoretical issues." He added that any "plainness" in Marchetti's writing is "instrumental—to forge a persuasive clarity for her specific thesis from fundamental concepts such as race and gender that can become stale and even obfuscatory in standard film studies jargon." MELUS contributor Cynthia F. Wong remarked: "The great value of Marchetti's study lies in her lively engagement with the historical and cultural contexts of the films…. One of Marchetti's main accomplishments in this academic study, then, has to do with how well she represents the films to her readers as products of racial and social consciousness, in hopes that such a critique of these volatile issues might increase the need to re-see and re-think the role of mass media."

Marchetti is also author of From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997, a focused look at the depiction of Chinese culture in late twentieth-century film, and editor of Hong Kong Film, Hollywood, and the New Global Cinema: No Film Is an Island, a discussion of how Hong Kong films contrast with films from Hollywood.