Gender Meets Race: Andy Tennant’s Anna and the King (1999) and Walter Lang's The King and I (1956)

Abstract

Both Tennant's Anna and the King and Lang's The King and I stage the prohibition of physical contact between the 'white woman' and the 'yellow king'; they employ stark oppositions and attempt to contain hybridity. Nevertheless, the clear-cut binarisms are imploded in both films. This is partly due to the films' thwarting of cultural inscriptions of race and gender [...]. Ironically, the 1999 version - and this is my thesis - turns out to be more racist than the original version from 1956 as Tennant's remake adheres to imperialist ideas even more intransigently than Lang's film.