Despite the &8239;rise of the Hollywood &8239;system &8239;and hostility to Asian migrant communities in the early twentieth-century United States, Japanese Americans &8239;created a &8239;thriving cinema culture that &8239;produced films and established theaters and exhibition companies to facilitate their &8239;circulation &8239;between &8239;Japan and the United States. &8239;Drawing from a fascinating multilingual archive including the films themselves, movie industry trade press, Japanese American newspapers, oral histories, and more, this book reveals &8239;the experiences of Japanese Americans at the cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, exhibition, and spectatorship. In doing so,&8239;Denise Khor &8239;recovers previously unknown films such as &8239;The Oath of the Sword&8239;(1914), likely one of the earliest Asian American film productions, and illuminates the global circulations that have always constituted the multifaceted history of American cinema.&8239;

Khor &8239;opens up transnational lines of inquiry and draws &8239;comparisons &8239;between early Japanese American cinema and Black cinema to &8239;craft &8239;a broad and expansive history of &8239;a transnational public sphere shaped by the circulation and exchange of people, culture, and ideas across the Pacific.