The Movies of Racial Childhoods

Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian/America

Celine Parreñas Shimizu

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781478025658
  9781478020912
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478027775
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In The Movies of Racial Childhoods Celine Parreñas Shimizu examines early twenty-first-century cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American children. Drawing on psychoanalysis and her own perspective as a mother grieving for a deceased child, Shimizu considers how cinema renders Asian American children through sexualized racial difference, infantilization, and premature adultification. She looks at how Asian American childhood is characterized in film through experiences of alienation and trauma and contends that childhood development requires finding freedom and self-sovereignty through agentic attunement. In analyzing films that focus on queer Asian American youth such as Spa Night (2016) and Driveways (2019) and those that explore the trauma of being an immigrant like Yellow Rose (2019) and The Half of It (2020), Shimizu demonstrates that films can prompt viewers to evaluate their own childhood development. They also allow the opportunity to understand the demands placed upon Asian American children, particularly in regard to race and sexuality. In this way, cinema becomes a vehicle for empowering our inner child and the children all around us.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface. Devastated Creator: Theorizing as Grieving Mother-Author-Spectator
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Agents of Our Own Lives,Centers of Our Own Stories
• 1. A Deluge of Delusions and Lies: Race, Sex, and Class in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
• 2. The Inner Life of Cinema and Selfobjects: Queer Asian American Youth in Spa Night and Driveways
• 3. Adolescent Curiosity and Mourning: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
• 4. The Courage to Compose Oneself: Healthy Narcissism and Self-Sovereignty in Yellow Rose
• 5. The Unexpected and the Unforeseen: Cultural Complexes in the Half of It
• In Closing: The Power of Films about Racial Childhoods in the Time of Rampant Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index