The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media

Lori Lopez, Vincent Pham, Lori Lopez, Vincent Pham, Lori Kido Lopez, Lori Kido Lopez, Vincent Pham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317540830
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media. Contributor essays focus on new approaches to the study of Asian American media including explorations of transnational and diasporic media, studies of intersectional identities encompassed by queer or mixed race Asian Americans, and examinations of new media practices that challenge notions of representation, participation, and community. Expertly organized to represent work across disciplines, this companion is an essential reference for the study of Asian American media and cultural studies.

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Introduction

Why Asian American Media Matters

Lori Kido Lopez and Vincent N. Pham

2015 marked a banner year for Asian Americans in the media. In early 2015, ABC premiered Fresh Off the Boat—the first Asian American sitcom since the legendary failure of Margaret Cho’s All American Girl in 1994. The adaptation of celebrity chef Eddie Huang’s memoir was met with excitement from both audiences and critics, and was eventually renewed for additional seasons. In late 2015, ABC did the unthinkable and released a second Asian American sitcom. Dr Ken starred Ken Jeong of The Hangover fame, and was loosely based on Jeong’s life as a doctor. Along with the prominence of Asian American actors like Aziz Ansari, John Cho, Mindy Kaling, Kal Penn, Ming-Na Wen, Sandra Oh, and many others, it seemed that Asian Americans had finally arrived, particularly within the television landscape.

Yet there was barely time to celebrate these victories before Asian Americans were cut back down to size. At the 2016 Academy Awards, comedian Chris Rock slammed Asian Americans in a distasteful joke featuring three Asian child actors. Rock described the kids as accountants from the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, stating: “They sent us their most dedicated, accurate, and hard-working representatives. Please welcome Ming Zhu, Bao Ling, and David Moskowitz. If anybody’s upset about that joke, just tweet about it on your phone that was also made by these kids.” The anti-Asian sentiment felt particularly out of place at an event where Hollywood’s racism problem was already on full display. Prior to the event, the Academy had been roundly condemned for failing to nominate people of color in the acting categories. On social media, commenters used the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite, originally created by writer April Reign, to call attention to the obvious inequalities. While the ceremony was flooded with Black presenters and Rock addressed the controversy in multiple jokes, it was clear that race was only understood as a Black/White issue. As usual, Asian Americans were left out of the picture.

Although the recent visibility of Asian American concerns with regard to media issues seems novel, it most certainly is not new. For the last 50 years, Asian American artists and storytellers have utilized moving images to share their cultures, histories, and traditions both inside and outside their own communities. Their continued passion for doing so reminds us why Asian American media matters—it gives Asian Americans the ability to document and create representations of themselves, and in doing so, sustain community identities and develop a sense of belonging in the United States, where over 19 million Asian Americans continue to struggle against racism and cultural exclusion. In the last decade we have begun to see shifts in the symbolic landscape, as a growing number of Asian Americans are being featured as actors, writers, and directors for television and film. From becoming bona fide Hollywood blockbuster directors like Justin Lin (the Fast and Furious franchise) and Jennifer Yuh Nelson (Kung Fu Panda) to dominating the YouTube scene, Asian Americans have become more prominent in mainstream and niche media and across various media platforms. But this move toward the mainstream does not even begin to describe the complicated pathways that Asian American scholars are now charting as they investigate the meaning behind these shifts. What do Asian Americans bring to mainstream media that reshapes public culture and ideas of race? How does Asian American participation in online and digital media shift notions of media representation? How can we revisit a history of Asian American media in ways that reinvigorate our understanding of the present and future?

Past explorations have yielded a small but important body of work that laid the foundation for understanding Asian American media. An edited anthology called Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts (Leong 1992) was one of the first collections to explore some of these themes, mixing essays from academics, artists, and filmmakers in their exploration of the early days of Asian American cinema. Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (Hamamoto and Liu 2000) and Screening Asian Americans (2002) discuss early Asian American film and video with essays on the specific films that shaped the direction of the field in its infancy, while Identities in Motion (2002) by Peter X Feng focuses on Asian American filmmakers and their representations of Asian American identity. These seminal texts have been integral in charting the development of Asian American cinema and the contours of its representations. Yet, the category of “Asian American media” expands far beyond film, including a wide range of media, such as television, music, advertising, and mobile and digital media. There is also a need to examine the complex media industries and institutions in which Asian Americans are now playing a key role.

Some of these issues have been taken up within Kent Ono and Vincent Pham’s Asian Americans in the Media (2009) and two edited collections: East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005) and the follow-up Global Asian American Popular Cultures (2016), co-edited by Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren. Yet the landscape of Asian America is always changing beneath us, and there is an urgent need for producing original scholarship that examines Asian American media issues specifically from a media studies or communication perspective, shedding the constraints of literary theory or sociology that have long provided interdisciplinary lenses of analysis in the field. In this collection we have assembled a wide diversity of scholars who approach the study of Asian American media on its own terms, rigorously historicizing their work from the scholarship that has come before while charting new pathways and innovative approaches. Although we recognize that we cannot possibly explore all the aspects of Asian American media, this book attempts to probe the breadth and depth of its contours—examining both historical and contemporary texts, considering all facets of media production and consumption, and including the often marginalized voices of queer, mixed race, transnational, and diasporic Asian Americans.

Postracial Media Environments, Industries, and the Relocation of Asian America

In posing a response to the contemporary challenges of Asian American media in an evolving mediasphere, a number of common themes began to organically emerge across the contributions from our authors. First, scholars must contend with the “postracial” context that has come to influence so many conversations about racialized communities, identities, and cultural products. It has become widely accepted that race is a social construction, constituting an insoluble way of living and being in the world. Yet, the postracial context assumes that race is no longer an issue and that treating it as such serves to divide and constrain U.S. society. As a result, media and media makers have responded accordingly to survive in a postracial (and capitalist) media environment by choosing to remain silent on racial issues, avoiding explicit assertions of racial identification, or to highlight race only in terms of ethnic flavor and difference. Across the different chapters in this collection, postraciality emerges as an unavoidable aspect of contemporary life that scholars must account for in understanding how Asian American media attends to this new environment. Responses to postraciality are seen taking place through sounds, accents, coded ways of dealing with identity, commercialization, and more. Yet the evidence of postraciality and the ways Asian American media reify or oppose it remains a challenge to Asian American media going forth.

As the postracial context becomes the norm, another recurring theme for Asian American media scholars is a grappling with contemporary relationships to media industries—including negotiating relations between mainstream and independent, “new” and “old” media forms, and physical versus online spaces. Foundational scholarship on Asian American media often focused within the confines of a single setting—most commonly, film or television. Yet such boundaries and borders have become increasingly porous in response to media convergence, with media makers, organizers, and consumers easily traversing different media platforms in search of content. Asian American media no longer operates as an independent silo or community-driven endeavor, but now additionally helps provide exposure and training for those who are involved. Asian American film festivals utilize digital and social media tools to connect with new audiences or to drive conversations, while online producers call attention to independent films and mainstream media. These complex engagements enrich the scope and impacts of media representations through their interactive and participatory modes, and demand sensitivity in accounting for their possibilities and limitations.

Finally, as we consider the question of why Asian American media matters, we posit relocation as an important theme that reminds us to continually ask where Asian America resides. The concept of relocation operates both physically and metaphorically, particularly in examining relocations via transnational and diasporic flows of bodies, ideas, and technologies. Whether it is through ethnic media, documentary film, or mobile platforms, Asian American media’s purview of the local is no longer confined to the United States, but instead shifts in relation to the locations of its users and their interconnected networks. In the chapters that follow, we can begin to relocate the margins and move participating voices to the center in efforts to show the possibilities for Asian American media in moving forward. Overlooked forms of media and previously unheard stories can then come to the forefront and blaze new paths for the study of Asian American media.

Outline of Chapters

This book is organized into five parts, although there is significant thematic overlap between and among them. The first section, “Theorizing Representation: Visions and Voices of Asian America,” contains chapters that lay a theoretical groundwork for the analysis of Asian Americans and media. They ask: how has Asian American media been studied in the past, and what kind of research has been missing? What belongs to the category of “Asian American media,” and more importantly, what is its social and political significance? The collection opens with two pieces exploring the important role of sound, which is often overlooked in favor of focusing on visuality and representation in Asian American media. Ming-Yuen S. Ma takes us back to the early days of Asian American cinema and examines the relationship between mediated sound and the much-heralded creation of an “Asian American voice.” Ma asks whose voices are audible and whose are silenced in early Asian American independent films, positing the power of what he calls the “negative voice” to more accurately represent the struggles and experiences of Asian American communities. Grace Wang continues this investigation of sound in “Diasporic Soundscapes of Belonging: Mediating Chineseness with Shanghai Restoration Project.” Her analysis moves into our current era, where she argues that one way of addressing questions about Asian America and its global relationship to Asia is through music. She particularly focuses on David Liang’s Shanghai Restoration Project, whose blending of Chinese traditional instruments and electronic hip-hop beats creates a sonic landscape that reflects the transnational sensibilities and search for belonging that are familiar to many Asian Americans today.

These questions about what constitutes fluid and shifting categories such as “Asian American music” are also at the heart of Jun Okada’s chapter, which examines who belongs to the category of the “Asian American artist.” In her exploration of the biracial artist and filmmaker Laurel Nakadate, Okada asks if it is possible for an Asian American to disavow race when collective identification has so long defined Asian American politics. Her examination of the way that Nakadate’s media works express feelings of loneliness and alienation helps to explode these categories and make room for a new and politically productive form of postraciality. While the categories of Asian American music, sound, and art are shifting, so is the role of Asian American media organizations that attempt to coordinate these media. In Vincent N. Pham’s chapter, he returns to the Center for Asian American Media, one of the oldest and most recognizable Asian American media organizations in the nation, and examines the discourse at its Present/Future Summit event, which sought to assess the state of Asian American media. His analysis of the public discussion reveals the particular anxieties and concerns of Asian American media makers and organizations as they deal with the paradigm-shifting presence of digital media, examining both its complications and potential for creating a financially stable yet apolitical system of storytelling.

Many scholars who are interested in the field of Asian American media studies are also drawn to the artistic and professional media world, where their hands-on participation as practitioners can result in a very different kind of intervention than in traditional academia. Ma, Okada, and Pham remind us in their chapters that Asian American media has always been a deeply political practice, premised on the ability of media to promote social justice and impact communities on the ground. As such, it is not uncommon to see Asian American media studies professors and graduate students taking up parallel careers as directors of film festivals, filmmakers, or media arts organizers. We are excited to highlight the writing and unique perspectives of four “scholar-practitioners” in this collection. Their insights are grounded in a productive blend of academic literature and personal experience, as each has spent significant time immersed in the world of Asian American filmmaking and film festivals. Brian Hu is the artistic director of Pacific Arts Movement and the presenter of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, while Vanessa Au is the director of the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. Both are interested in the evolution of the Asian American film festival from its earliest iterations to today. Hu examines the contentious rise of the feature film and the way that Asian American film festivals have both celebrated and maligned this particular form. While some believe that the feature film represents mainstream acceptance and financial viability, others see it as capitulating to market forces that negate the political impact of alternative media. Au similarly recognizes the difficulties of programming Asian American content in an increasingly diversified media landscape and worries about the continued relevance of Asian American film festivals. Yet in drawing on her own experiences, she is able to put forward a powerful set of strategies for adapting to the digital environment so that Asian American film festivals can continue to survive and thrive.

Elaine H. Kim and Valerie Soe both explore what they believe must be recognized as important contributions to the Asian American film canon—Kim examines feature films made by women directors, while Soe examines contemporary documentary films and their political messages. Kim is the co-founder of Asian Women United of California and director of documentaries such as Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and Film (1988) and Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded (2010). Her chapter calls attention to the works of Asian American female filmmakers, assessing films by Bertha Bay-Sa Pan, Alice Wu, and Jennifer Phang. Her analysis is based on interpretations of the way that their films deal with issues of race, gender, and culture, alongside observations based on her own conversations ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Why Asian American Media Matters
• PART I Theorizing Representation: Visions and Voices of Asian America
• PART II Asian American Media Production: Perspectives from Scholar-Practitioners
• PART III Hybrid Asian Americans: Media at the Margins
• PART IV Asian American New Media: Digital Artifacts, Networks, and Lives
• PART V Expanding the Borders of Asian America: Diaspora and Transnationalism
• Index