Seminar: Saving Face

This seminar will explore the use of translation and silence in Alice Wu’s Saving Face (2004) through a critical race and queer studies lens. 

What is lost in translation from dialogue to subtitle for the non-Mandarin speaking viewer? Where does cultural translation break down between generations, and what might that mean for questions around language, nationality, and assimilation?  Silence punctuates these gaps in understanding, be it during non-translated dialogue, in the weight of unspoken familial secrets, or even in the film’s navigation of Blackness and Asianness, but how might we read that which goes unsaid? 

ABOUT ARIANNA QIANRU JAMES 

Arianna Qianru James is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in the African American & Black Diaspora Studies Program and the Cinema and Media Studies Program in the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025, where she specialized in African American and Asian American literature and film studies. Arianna’s other research and teaching interests include media and fan work, speculative fiction, and digital humanities, as well as constellating theories around queerness, mixedness, and the body.