Roger Ebert Lecture: “A Yellow Spot on the Silver Screen”—Anna May Wong’s Performative Pleasure

The 2025 Roger Ebert Lecture and Screening will be held October 23-24 in the Knight Auditorium of Spurlock Museum.

Join us in person or via Zoom on Friday, Oct. 24, at 2 p.m. for the 2025 Roger Ebert Lecture, “A Yellow Spot on the Silver Screen”—Anna May Wong’s Performative Pleasure, given by Yiman Wang, professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz.  Wang’s lecture will present from her recent book To Be an Actress, on early Hollywood Chinese-American performer Anna May Wong and her work in cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Anna May Wong forged a four-decade media-crossing, border-crossing career largely during the U.S. segregation era. Her recent return to public attention testifies to her indelible legacy. Yet, how we might reanimate her legacy remains a question. 

Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, Wang invites a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.  

Presented by the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies and the Asian American Cultural Center.

As part of the annual Roger Ebert Lecture and Screening, join us for the screening of Piccadilly (1929) on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum. E.A. Dupont’s film starring Chinese-American pioneer Anna May Wong is a formative cinematic entry in the transition from silent to sound films. Part crime drama and part thriller, Piccadilly uses its technical advances to tell the story of a dancer framed for murder in the London nightclub scene. Don’t miss this fascinating entry in classic British cinema. 

About the Presenter

Yiman Wang is Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (University of Hawaii Press 2013), and To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World (University of California Press 2024). 

She has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on topics of feminist media histories, ethnic border-crossing stardom, eco-cinema and environmental media, Chinese cinema, independent documentary, film remakes and adaptation. She is editor of a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on Asian Feminist Media (2019), co-editor of an InFocus Dossier on Queering Asian Media in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2023), co-editor of Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (2025), and co-editor of the Global East Asian Screen Cultures book series published by Bloomsbury. Presented by the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.