Ghostlife of Third Cinema

Asian American Film and Video

Glen M. Mimura

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816667871
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. For Glen M. Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema's radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. In Ghostlife of Third Cinema, Mimura confronts the ongoing erasure of Asian American independent media and illuminates its cultural and political significance today.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What is Asian American Cinema?
• 1. Diaspora, or Modernity’s Other: Theorizing Asian American Identity and Representation
• 2. In The Afterglow of Regenerative Violence: Third Cinema and Asian American Media Discourse
• 3. Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Spectrality and the Experimentalist Turn
• 4. Uncanny Memories: Post-Redress Media in Japanese American History
• 5. Diaspora Sexualities: Asian American Queer Video in the World System
• Notes
• Filmography
• Index