That Expensive Oriental Flesh: The Racial Form of a New Deal Musical

Busby Berkeley's "Shanghai Lil" number in Warner Bros.' Great Depression–era musical Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon, 1933) stages an explicitly propagandist display in and as an openly offensive, orientalist spectacle. Set in a licentious bar in an imaginary Shanghai populated by sailors, flappers, prostitutes, and international businessmen, the number reaches its euphoric climax with a large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt composed in the fashion of a mass ornament by a group of white chorus girls in yellowface masquerade. Countering the reading of the number as "pure spectacle," this essay locates its meaning by tracing the grammar of race deployed in the film's narrative section to dramatize the situation of automating and deskilling creative labor in the age of the talkies and an economic depression. It argues that the racial form of this New Deal musical offers a spectacularized and fantastic form of solution to a historic crisis, where the exotic space and people were manufactured and staged for patriotic fanfare that stimulated consumption while allegorizing, through the irony of racist humor, capitalist production and labor conditions.