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AAST355: Asian American Studies, Readings - Coggle Diagram

- - - - "To summarize, the dismantling stereotypes school of criticism is primarily concerned with deconstructing Anna May Wong as a signifier of exoticism, cruelty, and Asian despotism, and as the female embodiment of masochism (28)."
  - - - "The oscillation between prevailing perceptions of Wong's characters as villainess and victim coincides with the limitations of many, if not all, of her roles (24)."
        
        "The 'dragon lady' provokes and titillates early film audiences because she clocks an almost masculine racial pride and anti-white race hatred in the mutually reinforcing 'duplicity' of being Asian and being a woman (24)."
        
        "With the 'butterfly', personifying naivety and self-abnegation, Wong's characters conveniently 'elect' suicide so as to not mar the future happiness of their white lovers and their white fiancees, in the process consoling Western audiences with a fantasy of colonial power over the ever-yielding East (25)."
      - "Moreover, any implication among fans that Wong's interior life differed from the flat stereotypes she portrayed in her film roles was probably more desirable than the film industry's constant conflation of the actress with the roles she played (30)."
        Within the film industry, it's easy to forget the distinction between the actor and the character they play on screen. For example, Ryan Reynolds is reportedly unfunny in real life, even his on-screen persona is a comedian. This confusion leads to the gradual replacement of reality with the manufactured facsimile presented on-screen.
- - - - "In the early-morning hours, sheriff's deputies rousted each tenant from his room, and the elderly Filipinos and Chinese were led out the door with only the clothes on their backs (1)."
      - "Consequently, the neighborhood stood in the way of 'progress,' and many of the single-resident-occupancy hotels that made the core of the community had already been demolished (3-4)."
      - "Many of the elderly died during the struggle or soon after, and I had to cope with the feelings of guilt and remorse (5)."
  - - - "For the young people, this sharply contrasted with the narrowly youth-oriented expressions of the mainly white antiwar and counterculture movements (2)."
      - "Students felt compelled to 'Serve the People' in their own communities, and the I-Hotel, right on the edge of Chinatown, was a magnet for Chinese as well as Filipino activists (3)."
    - - "It gaped like an open wound for Filipino Americans, a reminder of both discrimination and defiance that marked our history in the United States (4)."
  - - - "The left-oriented elderly—many of whom were seasoned veterans of the labor movement—joined with the newly ridiculed youth to create an identity through political struggle (2)."
      - "Despite the 1977 eviction, the International Hotel movement was never entirely defeated, and it grew to legendary importance to the communities involved (4)."
      - "Although the old building and its tenants are gone, the new, rebuilt International Hotel is devoted to low-income housing for the elderly and disabled (5)."
        The fall of the I-Hotel is described as a wound. Though the physical building was demolished, it's reassuring to know that its legacy and the spirit of those involved in its defense persisted. The rebuilt International Hotel, in my mind, is the symbolic healing of an old wound.
- - - - "The shock of returning to Vietnam reminds Le that she is still a refugee because she has not yet settled into American capitalist success (110)."
        Connection between cultural assimilation/being American and capitalist success.
        
        "Moreover, as Eric Tang argues, refuge is. fiction for many refugees who are resettled in neoliberal, late-capitalist Western nations, particularly in the poorest areas targeted for social death, as they continue to exist in a 'cycle of uprooting, displacement, and captivity' (114)."
      - "Broadly refugeetude describes a coming into consciousness of the forces that produce and structure 'rogue' and 'refugee' (110)."
        The suffix '-tude' connects the shared experiences of marginalization and oppression characterizing "negritude, coolitude, and migritude." It's interesting how connections and meaning can be packed into how a word is structured.
        
        "The temporality of refugee is conventionally short, an aberration in the otherwise consistent experience of nationality and political rights...In this framework, the refugee is not a viable political subject (112)."
        The exclusion of refugees from politics is indicative of their being outside the system and the strange space they occupy between the 'country of his nationality' and the country they seek 'to acquire protection' from.
  - - - "Chased by the police while at sea on another escape attempt, Le had to hide, disguise and move stealthily to evade capture, effectively becoming a fugitive... (115)."
      - "It is the ideological grounding, and legal instrument, for the criminalization of refugees (116)."
  - - - "Put differently and more explicitly, most refugees in the world experience their condition as refugees indefinitely, sometimes for an entire lifetime (113-114)."
- - - - Roddy Bogawa (Some Divine Wind) and how the influence of Warhol in his work, how his personal style, is overshadowed by his film being an "Asian American film (33)"
      - Helen Lee's films My Niagara and Sally's Beauty Spot showcase the meaning of the "American" part of "Asian American."
        My Niagara features a protagonist who can be "read as either Asian American or Asian Canadian (34)."
        Sally's Beauty Spot juxtaposes Korean Canadian Sally with Scottish/Eurasian Nancy Kwon.
  - - - "'Asian American International? What's that? It just means Asian movies get lumped in with the Asian American stuff.' Mainstream media critics also lump Asian American media with the product from Asia... (33)"
      - "Even when the film is 'correctly' applied to films made by Asian Americans, that label often becomes all that a media critic can see."
    - - Much of the text tackles what exactly is included in Asian American Cinema.
        
        What are the "Asian American issues" that define Asian American cinema?
        
        Is a movie without Asian American issues included in that definition?
        
        Is there a consistent framework for identifying Asian American cinema?
        
        "...we're not exclusively about cultural recovery, we're not exclusively preoccupied with depicting our heritage through the recurrent themes of immigration, the Internet [the murder of Vincent Chin [and the ensuring court cases] (34)" - Abe Ferrer.
        
        There's ultimately no one correct representation of the Asian American experience. Hence why there's not one "strict, content-based definition."
        
        The text suggests that Asian American filmmaking is defined not by its content but by its modes of production. There's "a sense of 'community' pervades much of Asian American media from the same period (34)" derived from filmmakers lending their support to one another.
        
        "'Asian American stories through the eyes of Asian American filmmakers. So there are Asian American filmmakers who are making stories about things besides Asian American (35)."
    - - The author uses the term "Asian American Cinema Movement" to denote a paradigm shift in Asian American filmmaking that occurred in the 1970s.
        
        "'For me Asian American Cinema describes a period of filmmaking rather than an ongoing cultural presence."
    - - The hyphen creates a divide between "Asian" and "American," and for many, it represents the disconnect between the two cultures and the impossibility of reconciliation. To the author, "the words we use to describe the word influence the ways we see it (35)." To the author, these words have meaning beyond the page, and, in rejecting the hyphen, the author maintains some level of hope that differences between these cultures are trivial.
- - - - I find it interesting how Marchetti ends the introductory paragraph with the comment that "Hollywood's romance with Asia tends to be a flirtation with the exotic rather than an attempt at any genuine intercultural understanding (1)." To me, it's reflective of many of our earlier films, notably Daughter of the Dragon and Toll of the Sea, wherein elements of Asian culture are presented more for appeal than for any true meaningful engagement. The portrayal of Asian Americans in film can be boxed into six key narratives: Rape, Captivity, Salvation, Sacrifice, Tragedy, Transcendence, Assimilation.
        
        "Hollywood films operate mythically. They take up, aestheticize, and symbolically resolve social consadictions, then deny the process by masking their ideological operations behind an apparently seamless, "invisible style (8)"
        
        "Seduction tales posit the white hero or heroine as an irresistible moral force that 'saves' the Asian lover from the evils or excesses of his or her decadent culture (8)"
        
        "Rape narratives spose the danger that the 'pure' but hopelessly fragile and childlike white woman will be 'ruined' by contact with the dark villain (8)"
        
        "In assimilation narratives, the nonwhite lover completely relinquishes his or her own culture in order to be accepted into the American bourgeois mainstream, usually represented by the creation of a 'typical' nuclear family (8)"
        
        Throughout Anna May Wong's career, she was largely boxed into two archetypal characters, that of the "Dragon Lady" and "Madame Butterfly." These limitations were reflective of the larger narratives Asians were forced into in their on-screen representations.
    - - Hollywood's relationship with Asia being a fling is reaffirmed by
        
        The lack of "book-length scholarly study of the representation of Asians, Pacific Islands, and Asian Americans in Hollywood (2)"
        
        The prevalence of miscegenation and Hollywood's portrayal of Asian sexuality. It's noted that "Asian men tend to be depicted either as rapists or asexual eunuch figures", whereas "Asian females are often depicted as sexually available to the white hero (2)."
        
        It's noted that Hollywood's effeminiation of Asian males is an attempt to both assuage and project the "racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties,a dn the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East." Much of this fear was rooted in Genghis Khan's invasions of Europe and threat cheap Asian labor oversaturating the job market (2).
        
        One of Marchetti's more interesting observations is the connection between religion and Yellow Peril.
        
        "Race becomes tied to religion as a spiritual play between good and evil, sin and salvation (3)."
        
        "Stories featuring the yellow peril were arguments for racial purity." Certainly, the potential union of the Oriental and white implied, at best, a form of beastly sodomy, and, at worst, a Satanic marriage (3)."
        There's this suggestion that interracial romances, specifically those between the white woman ("the primary symbol of civilization") and the easterner, were unholy at best and corruptive on a societal level at worst.
        
        "Broadly speaking, these Hollywood narratives are part of what Edward W. Said has described in Orientalism as 'a Western style of dominating, restricting, and having authority over the Orient (6)." Marchetti reaffirms Film's argument regarding the power of film in both self-representation and on a societal level.
        
        It's revealing that both texts connect back to the depiction of Easterners as this great/exotic "unknowable" and how this "otherness" is a source of fear and separation. Color-as-hue and Color-as-race: Early Technicolor, Ornamentalism, and Toll of the Sea adds onto this point by noting how the differences between the cinematic presentation of the Easterner and Westerner are manufactured and accentuated by technicolor.
        
        I like how the author deliberates over the potential causes for Hollywood's behavior and its taboo sexuality. Bringing up possible causes, such as the repressiveness of the Victoria era and Yellow Peril, while never definitely labelling any as the cause reveals the complexity of the subject (4).
        
        "Rather, Hollywood used Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders as signifiers of racial otherness to avoid the far more immediate racial tensions between blacks and white or the ambivalent mixture of guilt and enduring hatred toward Native Americans and Hispanics (6)."
- - - - "Hence, an influential model for contemporary brown face and brown-voice performances is grounded in earlier work established in British comedy (20)."
      - "Bakashi's character is expressed through physical humor and emphasizes the contrast (seen as comedic ineptness) between him and Hollywood...American culture (21)."
        "Seller's characterization of Bakashi depicts him as an object to be commented on and responded to for comedic effect rather than an individual with his own story (21)."
        
        The humor of Bakashi derives from his separation from Western society.
      - "Indian participation in economic or social movements of the times is minimized and reduced to comic mannerisms (27)."
        Comedy here is used to minimize the societal importance of South Asians.
  - - - "In early film history, most Hollywood images of South Asians were confined to British (and sometimes) American tales of adventure or spiritual discovery set in colonial India (23)."
        
        Bhabbha's idea of 'productive ambivalence' again makes an appearance here, as the "otherness" of South Asians is both an object of derision (Bakashi) and desire (adventure and spiritual discovery).
        
        "Many of the distinctions among different religions in India, including Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity, are lost or lumped into the idea of power-hungry, blood-sacrificing religious cults who threaten the rule and order of the British (24)."
        
        "The films repeat stock characters, such as the orphaned waif, the loyal native, the religious fanatic or fakir, and the snake charmer (25)"
        We again see that idea of limited narratives. Confining South Asians to these boxes creates the message that South Asians are comparatively simpler, almost incapable of being dynamic and complicated characters. It also ties into the idea that many of these films are escapist fantasies, meant to be consumed and never engaging deeply with the subject matter.
      - One of the connections between two texts is the difference in attitudes towards Asians vs. Native Americans and blacks. Where Native Americans and African Americans are intrinsically linked to Western society, there's always a disconnect between westerners and Asians. In my mind, it's this relationship and the exclusion of Asians that resulted in yellowface persisting and blackface being condemned as offensive .
    - - "The brownface performance is how Americans want natives to act an has to do more with the dominant group and how the minority group fits into the dominant narrative (28)."
        
        "In the 1960s and 1970s, most Hollywood depictions of South Asians were focused on the hippie and mystical aspect of the culture and led to the characterizations of brownface performance that are precursors of contemporary portrayals (29)."
        
        "Brownface performances (that include Indian accents) of South Asians are continually repeated, and American performers learn to emulate Peter Sellers, whose performance is celebrated as 'a masterpiece of mimicry' (31)."
        
        The repetition of stereotypes through performance and film gives them the appearance of being natural and unquestionable. It similarly contributes to their continued influence in the marginalization of minorities within the "dominant narrative." It's only through productive ambivalence that we can challenge the validity of these stereotypes.
- - - - "The only Chinese women we meet are prostitutes, and the few Chinese men we encounter are asexual (42)."
        
        "In this, she resists the narrative of Slaying the Dragon, in which Asian American women are portrayed as universally decrying the lotus-blossom stereotype (51)."
        While Nancy Kwon acknowledges the potential impact of playing Suzie Wong, she nonetheless embraced the role and even refuted criticisms. Coming into this reading, I had assumed that there'd be a universal pushback against these damaging images, but I've realized now that I had my own unconscious conceptions of how people should respond. The diversity of responses to harmful stereotypes underlies the nuances in understanding representation and reveal Nancy Kwon as "the ultimate resistant actor."
      - "The spectator is simultaneously reassured that Asian women want to be beaten and allowed to displace revulsion onto the 'Orient' (42)."
    - - "The camera invites us to appreciate Suzie's form through convolutional cinematic syntax (beginning with a low-angle shot of her feet and tilting up her body), then asks us to reject her allure (43)."
    - - "As long as Susie is in her cheongsam or her lingerie, Robert is able to see her as Oriental first, prostitute second or not at all (43)."
        There's an uncomfortable implication within the film that Robert's affection for Susie is based solely on her exoticness.
- - - - "How do we assess what pleasure and pain look like?
        How do we register how trauma shapes perception?
        How do we explain pleasure in watching one's annihilation on stage or screen (19)?"
        
        "Important is the interrogation of how sexuality occurs and how pleasure is defined in the way we assess political critique in performance (96)."
      - "Sexuality, as punishment, discipline, and possibility, comprises Asian American women, so its discussion acknowledges them as truly viable subjects of study especially as they introduce alternative realities from the norm (19-20)."
      - "We can acknowledge images of Asian women as as perversely and pathologically sexual in Western cinema and from there argue that the condemnation of non-normative sexuality and the simplification of the process of viewing a film do not sufficiently capture the political possibilities raised in watching race and sex on screen (21)."
    - - "It is important to recall the historical context of sexuality that inscribed the immigration of Asian women into the United States... (17)"
        
        Chinese women prostitutes -> Page Law in 1870 curbs immigrant population.
        
        Japanese women were "picture brides" pre-WWII and "war brides" post-WWII (17).
        
        Korean women were similarly "war brides" accompanied by "American G.I husbands after the Korean War (18)."
    - - "Productive perversity involves identifying with 'bad' images, or working to establish a different identity along with established sexual images as to expand racial agendas beyond the need to establish normalcy and standardization (21)."
        The hypersexual image of Asian/American women is unquestionably damaging, yet simply discounting both the performance and sexuality as bad or atypical ignores their nuanced relationships to larger social structures and dynamic framework of representation.
        
        "But if sex is so bad, how can we talk about both the lives and representations of girls and women who are shaped by it (22)?"
        
        " A key element of understanding politically productive perversity is performance and its role in constructing race, gender, sex, and representation (22)."
        
        "Hypersexual representations of Asian women actually express various experiences of trauma, terror, and pain as well as joy, self-recognition, and alliance for those who produce, consume, and criticize these images (23)."
  - - - The "bind of representation" describes the viewing, performing, and criticizing of hyper sexuality as it relates to the portrayal of Asian/American women. The "hypersexual Asian women in representation haunts the experiences and perceptions of Asian women across different contexts (16)."
      - "Hypersexuality for Asian American women is a network of social forces that ground their legibility in culture, as terms for self-recognition and as condition of social marginalization that leads to opportunities for creative self-invention (17)."
- - - - "Independent Asian American male filmmakers try to escape the binary frame of manhood as weak or strong by revealing how the social forces of race, gender, class, and sexuality inform choices and desires but in ways that do not preclude the particularities of individual attractions, preferences, and histories (124)."
      - "Film is a mesmerizing medium for capturing the process of subject formation where men wrestle with self and group identity in owning back their lack and their macho (124)."
        
        "Byler is right to work in film, a medium that structures and forms our ideas about masculinity and sexuality (127)."
    - - Straitjacket sexuality, as the author describes it, is a dichotomy between lack and macho. There's a pressure on Asian American men to compensate for lack with macho, and it forces them into a binary framework of masculinity.
        
        "Like other radicalized communities, Asian Americans experience pressures regarding coupling in terms of gendered hierarchies of sex (126)."
    - - To counteract the limited framework of straitjacket sexualities, Shimizu argues that masculinity as it relates to relationships and identity it an "ever changing complexity (infinity) (129)" in relation to sex, romance, and circumstance. While there are a number of examples used to support this, the one we focus on is Better Luck Tomorrow.
        
        "It's for 'Asian reasons' that Justin Lin counters the Hollywood film depiction of Asian Americans and instead in Better Luck Tomorrow develops a multiplicity of characters that show a range of possibilities for Asian American men (156)."
        
        Ben and Steve's masculinity is predetermined by the model minority myth. Near the beginning of the film, Ben is the stereotypical Asian American: quietly pining away for Stephanie, emasculated, and doing his best to pad out extracurriculars for a chance of being admitted into an Ivy League. On the other hand, Steve's aggressive masculinity is exemplified through his competitiveness in his college admission, his relationship with Stephanie, and his superiority to Ben. As the film progresses, we see Ben adopt more hypermasculine acts to make up for his perceived lack of macho. With Ben's "unethical" murdering of Ben and "cheating", the film dramatizes the "real consequences of aggression (158)."
        
        "To reach for phallic power to remedy the wound of asexuality and effeminacy will kill you as a consequence of hurting others (158)."
        
        "It's a manhood that claims subjectivity outside available ones, commenting on the violence of the limited choices available to Asian American men with a device that's open-ended and promising (159)."
        
        "Privileging the phallus and the penis in this story leads to Ben's body functioning as a loaded gun that explodes in the act of killing the other who reaped the rewards of his romantic work (158)."
        
        "The situation is the moment when one meets the other who has the special potential, in his totality (the known) and infinity (the unknown), to put the whole self into question (162)."
  - - - "[Levina] describes the highest of ethics as a responsibility to care for the other, but this does not necessarily always require mutuality (125)."
        
        "Filmmakers use this technology to offer social critique by creating subjects whom we may evaluate for their ethics — the ability to go beyond themselves and to use their power to care for others as well (130)."
        
        "By enabling audiences to experience the struggles, missteps, and resolutions of Asian American characters, thereby encouraging the viewer to sympathize with and root for them, these films invite us to identify with someone who could possibly be a friend, a lover, an ally (132)."
        This expands upon the previous ethics of filmmaking by suggesting that films have a capacity for helping the audience to "use their power to care for others as well."
        
        "A technology of ethics, then, is to create a worthwhile cinema through the power of the image and the power to imagine moving people to want to do the right thing of oneself and others (164)."
- - - - Film and self-representation are intrinsically linked to political and cultural citizenship. Film defines how Asian Americans are framed within the cultural zeitgeist.
        
        Desai mentions how this form of citizenship is, in its relationship to film, privatized. Citizenship is determined by "accurate" and "correct" representations in film (94).
        
        "Representations are made, manufactured, and mutable. Representation itself is neither positive nor negative, but is always produced through and in relation to power (94)".
        
        While Film and In Search of Asian American Cinema both touch on the nature of representation and whether it can truly be "good," Romance and the Yellow Peril focuses mainly how that representation has been distorted and embellished. It's difficult to say whether the surface-level representations in earlier films, if just the appearance of Asian elements, can truly be considered "representation."
      - The text describes Asian American cinema as the "site of sexualized abjection, fear, anxiety, and desire," a breeding ground for negative representations and archetypal characters such as Dragon Lady, Lotus Blossom, Fu Manchu, and "gook" (93). Even so, it asks us to consider the agency of actors (Bruce Lee, Sessue hayakawa, Anna May Wong, Nancy Kwan) and their roles in helping to define the relationship between Asian Americans and film.
- - - - "Likewise, the stereotype, which is a major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place', already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated (94)."
      - "...for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be imperially proved or logically construed (95)"
    - - "Only then does it become possible to understand the productive ambivalence of the object of colonial discourse — that 'otherness' which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity (96)"
        
        I think productive ambivalence relates closely to the idea of productive ambiguity in mathematics, wherein conflicting frames of reference give rise to new mathematical ideas. It's only through understanding and critiquing these conceptions of the "other," through colonial discourse, that we're able to engage with a stereotype's "effectivity.
        
        Foster, Colin, et al. “PRODUCTIVE AMBIGUITY IN THE LEARNING OF MATHEMATICS.” FLM Publishing Association, journal-article, July 2011, flm-journal.org/Articles/5E44CD4ED073EEC7BFD059094BCBBF.pdf.
        
        Anna May Wong, through her works and relation to key technicolor films such as The Toll of the Sea, embodies how social structures reframe our understanding of film. It's only through viewing the early Oriental films of the 1920s-30s through a modern lens and engaging with these 'imposed roles' that we're able to achieve productive discourse.
- - - - "The perception of the 'flesh tint' was based on a specific notion of whiteness (295)."
        "...it should be obvious that the 'sufficiently red-orange' flesh tints prioritized in the Technicolor color scheme is designed to 'best reproduce[e] Caucasian skin tones', supporting Winston's claim about the 'white technology' of colour cinema (296).'
        
        "In short, The Toll of the Sea could be seen as 'realist' because it conforms to the convention of storytelling that depicts the exotic as colourful, the Orient as ornamental (297)."
        "Specifically it is the relationship between the Chinese heroine and her environment that marks her as racially distinct from her Caucasian lover and female counterpart (299),"
    - - The first form of discourse is based on the prioritization of the "reproduction of pleasing flesh tone" in the development of cinematography and its connection with "white privilege (289)"
        The second form focuses on "chromophobia, defined by David Batchelor as the 'loathing of colour,' 'a fear of contamination by something that is unknown or appears unknowable'. (289)"
        
        "Chromophobia" can almost be connected to "natural color," a term which refers to "films 'photographed so that the colors are selected entirely by optical and mechanical means and reproduced again in a like manner." Counter to its definition, "nothing in the so-called 'natural color processes' is completely natural, direct, and indexical (289)"
        
        "In other words, the 'pallid color' is not so much an objective hue categorically 'given' to the complexion of a pre-existing race of the 'Chinese' or 'Asians'; rather, it functions as a symbolic and even moral attribution mobilized to maintain the historically constructed colour line that does not exist epidemically as much as psychologically (302)."
- - - - "In most cases, the skin is darkened, and the eyes are altered with eye shadow, tape, or prosthetics to make them look slanted (1)."
      - "The most prevalent type of yellow face character has been the 'Chinaman,' who sports slanted eyes, buckteeth, and a bald forehead, darkened skin, a long mustache, a cone-shaped hat, and baggy clothes (1)."
      - "Unlike blackface, which in the US, is widely considered an offensive form of performance that belongs in the past, yellow face has persisted into the twenty-first century (2)."
        
        "Compared to the history of blackface, which has been examined extensively in dozens of books and articles, yellow face has only been traded in a handful of publications (4)."
        One of the common themes across the readings is the lack of attention and care afforded to Asian American representation in cinema.
        
        "The absence of yellow face is catalogs and as a keyword in archival databases complicates the work of making it legible, informing both the concept itself and the research process through which it is understood (5)."
        
        "Yellowface, on the other hand, cannot be fully explained by the concepts of mirroring and mimicry because Asians were excluded from the national imaginary for most of US history (12)."
    - - The text brings up the controversy surrounding American actress Scarlett Johansson being cast in a more conventionally Asian role. The directors reportedly used CGI to alter Johnson to appear more Asian, yet CGI wasn't present in the final production. Even so, "protestors targeted the choice of Johansson and framed the decision as representative of the lack of opportunities for Asian and Asian American actors in Hollywood (3)." Though the use of technology for yellowface is questionable, there's an argument that yellowface itself is a technology for excluding Asian Americans.
        
        "The new realities created and revealed through yellow face technology were, in fact, predicated on contrived notions and stereotypes about Asians that flooded into the cultural gap opened by the exclusion of actual Asians (4)."
        
        During the Exclusion Era, The meaning of "Asia" shifted to be in terms of "undesirability, danger, and other threatening qualities that had to be excluded from the the nation (9)."
        This association was created by "made-up Asians" donning yellow face. It's not mistake that Bayard Taylor, someone who believed the Chinese race had "deeps on deeps of depart of depravity so shocking and horrible, that their character cannot even be hinted," would come up with the character of Fu Manchu.
        The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture: 1776-1876. www.gutenberg-e.org/haj01/frames/fhaj09.html.
        
        "The performers did not mirror reality; rather as Heiddegger puts it, they actively brough[t]-forth a new reality with every application of makeup, every donning of a costume, and every rehearsal of gestures and sounds (13)."
        
        "Yellowface, therefore, is at once technical, political, and artistic (10)."
      - Exclusion Era (1862 - 1940) encompasses the broad exclusion of Asians through events such as
        
        First wave of Chinese laborers in the 1950s
        
        1862 Anti-Coolie Act
        
        Naturalization Act of 1870
        
        Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
        
        Takao Ozawa v. US
        
        Immigration Act of 1917
        
        US v. Bhagat Singh Thind
        
        The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act)
        It's notable that the Chinese Exclusion Act "remains the only immigration law in US history to target a specific ethnicity (7)."
        
        Exclusion Era also witnessed violence being used as a tool for exclusion.
        "For example, in 1871, at least seventeen 'Chinamen' were lynched by a mob in Los Angeles, making it the largest mass lynching in US history (7)."
        
        "It was during the Exclusion Era that yellow face proliferated and evolved into a form that endures into the twenty-first century (8)."
- - - - Third Cinema - evolved from the anti colonial struggles for national liberation post WWII.
        
        1955 Bandung Conference
        
        Idea of Third World - "In the independent countries, third cinema is a cinema of decolonization, which expresses the will to national liberation, anti-mythic, anti-racist, anti-bourgeois, and popular (29)."
        
        "For example, the graininess or poor contrast of cheap film stock, used out of necessity by many Third Cinema makers lacking access to better resources and materials, could itself become a stylistic signifier of the underdevelopment thematicized, narrated, or otherwise represented by the film (31)."
        When reading this, I felt that this was another element of separation from conventional Hollywood films, the results of using cheap film stock. While there's an argument to be made that Hollywood could capture the effect just the same, there's a certain authenticity in that restriction, one that manifests a "special signifier." That last point might be pretentious.
        
        "At the level of film production, Third Cinema practitioners would seek to break down the hierarchical relations that characterized the division of labor in the studio systems (and, by extension, any capitalist industry) (32)."
      - "To be sure, no mode of cinema is completely distinct, autonomous; each mode appropriates or contains within itself elements of the other two (30)"
    - - "...[Sessue] Hayakawa was able to establish his own production company, Haworth Studios, before the consolidation of the big studio system eliminated such greater distribution of power and resources (36)."
        I wanted to note the use of the word 'power,' as it underlines the agency and influence that independent filmmakers were able to achieve in challenging prevailing narratives through their own.
        
        "...the structural conditions in which they worked circumscribed the possibility of sustained intervention or transformation at the level of production (37)."
        This contrasts with message on the power/agency of the independent filmmaker by introducing limits.
        
        "In sharp contrasts to the ongoing degradation of Asian Americans in Hollywood...these media activists established grassroots media centers, production skills workshops, and other resources, thereby creating the material conditions necessary for the growth of Asian American independent media (39)."
      - "[Visual Communications] enabled radical students of color to seize film as a tool for social justice and social change (37)."
- - - - "To retain this distance and sense of a self-enclosed culture, is to pretend that our histories are not already overlapping, that the borders of each of our cultures are not porous (52)."
        I really enjoy this conception of culture being "porous." It reflects how culture is fluid, continually changing with time and the introduction of new elements.
      - 'Racism with a distance" is the idea that "cultural zones are discrete and performed communities" with defined 'borders' and 'practices' (52)."
        The author refutes this idea through 'polycultural history' and by referencing how different communities have influenced one another to the point where their culture is more an amalgamation than a singular entity.
        
        "Polyculturalism, on the other hand, offers a dynamic view of history, mainly because it argues for cultural complexity and it suggests that our communities of the present are historically formed (53)."
        
        "Polyculturalism accepts the existence of differences in cultural practice, but it forbids us to see culture as static and antiracist critique as impossible (54)."
        
        When reading the quote on cinema, I was reminded of polyculturalism, this notion cultures are interconnected and dynamic. While it's easy to see First, Second, and Third cinema as a chain of progression and wholly distinct, it's not entirely genuine to say that they are. As Mimura notes, within "each mode" lies "elements of the other two."
      - While Bruce Lee embodies a positive masculinity, it's arguable that his image is a very limited narrative of Asian American masculinity. There's a pervasive question of whether Bruce Lee's legacy created another box that Asians might be expected to fill.
    - - With his bare fists and his nunchakus, Lee provided young people with the sense that we could be victorious, like the Vietnamese guerrillas, against the virulence of international capitalism (54)."
        
        "...'I, Bruce Lee, am a man who never follows those fearful formulas....So, no matter if your color is black or white, red or blue, I can still make friends with you without any barrier' (55)."
        
        "Lee's successes in the United States, then, cannot be credited only to the 1960s emergence of Hong Kong, but it must crucially be seen in light of the changed place of Asians in the United States as a result of U.S. immigration policy, the limited gains of the Asian American movement, and, due to the latter, the cheerless acceptance of multiculturalism."
        We hear about how a person influences culture that it's become easy to forget how culture influences people.
        
        "I have so much respect for Bruce, because I understand what he went through just by being black in America...He knew my struggle, and I knew his (58)."
    - - Third World is a political designation describing the states not led by the United States (first world) or the Soviet Union (second world). It's interesting it's used with a much broader definition, seemingly referencing anything not part of the dominant culture.
        Britannica Money. www.britannica.com/money/Third-World.
        
        "Four women of the of the SDS sounded the clarion call for an autonomous womens' organization when they wrote in mid 1967, 'We find that women are in a colonial relationship to men and we recognize ourselves as part of the Third World' (59)."
        
        "As a result, many young people turned to the struggles within that omnibus category the Third World to find the agent of revolutionary struggle (Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria), and they drew on that category to create the tentative united front for their own struggles at home (63)."
        
        "To meet the force of reaction and remove this exploitation, the Black Panther movement grew...We have before our eyes the examples of Cambodia, Africa, and the like" (64)."
        
        "The failure of the State Department African Americans was to be radically revised by the time the Vietnam War pushed the black liberation struggle closer to radicals in Asia (and in turn, creating the space of U.S. Asians to become more radical) (69)."
- - - - Tells the story of "two San Francisco cabbies on the hunt for their missing friend and their missing four thousand dollars (32)."
        
        Red and orange aesthetic.
        
        "...any Asian American feature at that time was a rare event."
        
        Director/Writer Wayne Wang "understood that the Asian American 'soul' was not a monolith.'
        Wayne Wang's comment is relevant to In Search of Asian American Cinema's descriptions of the multifaceted cultural identities and expressions captured under the term "Asian American." Similarly, the idea of film as political citizenship is reflected in the power of Wang's Chan is Missing to capture and broadcast the Asian American 'soul.'
        
        Chan is Missing was populated by real denizens of San Francisco's Asian American community playing themselves, or something close to it (33)."
        
        "It is eclectic, and it is essentially Asian American (32)."
        
        "if there is an Asian American soul, it is there in that reflection in the water, ever changing, but always visible if you know where to look (34)."
        The Asian American soul, in my view, is captured in the multiplicity of Asian American culture. It's ever-changing and captures an unexpected combination of elements, with a changing emphasis on certain features. However, it's in that weirdness, in its constant evolution, that it reveals itself.
    - - "Just like Wang before him, Justin Lin was an insider who had the confidence to be a provocateur, respectability cinema be damned (33)."
        I think the use of "provocateur" is apt. Creating transformative media is necessarily provocative, as it requires challenging dominant narratives.
        
        "Forty years after Chan is Missing, twenty years after Better Luck Tomorrow, the future has arrived in a movie that not only conjures the hybridity of Asian American culture but asserts that multiplicity as the quintessence of the American imagination (34)."
        Mentioning the time between these features underlines the gradual progression from acknowledgement to resolution. The history of struggle for "the right to be weird" is understandably extensive, existing long before Chan is Missing or any Asian American feature.
      - "Better Luck Tomorrow was a leap forward from the days when Asian American filmmakers bore the burden of representation, required to undo years of being both perpetual foreigners and model minorities, redeemed by uplift success stories (33)."
        It's funny how there was a white audience member who 'scolded Lin' for being inconsiderate to his community. There's a strong argument to be made that having that power of self-representation and self-determination is worth more than any positive portrayal or success story.
        
        "Asian American characters have the right to be whoever the hell they want to be!"
        Roger Ebert
        
        "It should come as no surprise that EEAAO has generated a fiercely polarized online response cineasts on social media infuriated by so many accolades for a movie that they just 'don't get' (34)."
- - - - "Yet even before the show premiered, others were complaining about the fact that the actors playing immigrants had to use fake accents for the role and that the show's casting reinforced the ideology that all Asian American peoples and cultures could be indiscriminately lumped together (2-3)."
      - "What kinds of representations of Asian Americans would be more or less problematic, and what counts as 'Asian American' to begin with in a world where individuals embody multiple and shifting identities? (4)"
    - - "Battles over representations of Asian Americans reveal the way that activists seeking to improve the representation of Asian Americans in entertainment media are engaging in a fight for cultural citizenship, or a deeper sense of belonging and acceptance within a nation that long rejected them (4)."
        
        "...Asian American media activists view cultural citizenship as a collective endeavor that cannot be accomplished at the level of the individual (5)."
        This ties back to the mention of Twitter and digital platforms as spaces for expression and media activism.
        
        "...the reality is that many groups of people are systematically denied the privileges that citizenship is assumed to accord, and many groups constantly struggle for an equal share in what we might call 'first-class' citizenship' (11)."
        
        "We can see that Asian Americans have not been conceptualized as American citizens for a number of reasons, ranging from legal prohibitions to citizenship, the realities of white privilege, assumptions that Asian Americans are politically inactive, or the blatant assumption that immigrant communities are disloyal (16)."
        
        "Through media activism, Asian Americans demonstrate their ability to perform cultural citizenship while working to achieve a broader movement towards cultural citizenship for others (15)."
        
        "It is not a coincidence that Asian Americans began organizing to protest racist media imagery in the 1970s, as this was when a collective and politicized Asian American identity began to form (20)."
        This really expands upon the reading's idea that representation (and media activism by extension) and citizenship are interlinked. It further demonstrates the power of collective action in both challenging the dominant narrative and achieving cultural citizenship.
    - - "Americans of Asian descent have historically been excluded from the media in multiple ways...actors are forced to repeatedly embody tired and offensive stereotypes, and they are frequently relegated to the role of a sidekick or background characters (6)."
        
        "The limited number of representations serves to fix a particular image within the public imagination and restrict possibilities (7)."
        
        "Threats of Asian Americans as the alien coincided with imagery of Asians in American media as grotesque beats incapable of humanity (17)."
        
        "Indeed one of the primary impacts of the way that Asian Americans have been represented is to shore up institutionalized racism (7)."
        
        "On the one hand, Asian Americans have historically been portrayed as noncitizens—as unassimilable perpetual foreigners, and the foreboding threat known as the yellow peril (16)."
      - "Each of these roles serves as a reminder that Asian American media activism chases after a moving target that cannot easily be reduced to a simple or universal set of demands (8)."