How may we begin to speak about Asian American cinema? How may we assess its particular historical significance, situate it in relation to the dominant narrative and cultural formations in the United States? Implicit in the term is a productive difficulty that is predicated partly on the panethnic heterogeneity of the category Asian American and partly on the formal and technical diversity encompassed by Asian American cinema. Bounded by its main participants’ collective identity, constructed in response to historically shared and discontinuous experiences of racism, the cultural discourse of Asian American cinema thereby names a range of technical practices typically...

Asian Americans have long participated in the making of the United States, yet their ubiquitous representation as perpetual foreigners regardless of generational status persistently represses their historical significance. Despite its erasure from popular historical consciousness today, Asian labor power was necessary for the material and symbolic closure of the nation’s master narrative: the geopolitical incorporation of the Pacific frontier signaled the completion of its mythohistorical trajectory, “from sea to shining sea.” Indeed, from the mid-nineteenth century until the Second World War, migrant labor from China, Japan, the Philippines, Korea, and India was fundamental to the plantation economy of Hawai’i, to...

As a creative, critical discourse, Asian American cinema may be best understood as articulations of Stuart Hall’s concept of the “local” and James Clifford’s “new localizing strategies,” articulations haunting the dominant myths both of the U.S. American superstate and of globalization. The national mythology offers a familiar story: known most widely as Manifest Destiny but tracing its lineage to Old World Puritan theology, it continues to animate United States nationalism to the present day. As numerous studies of the so-called national character have demonstrated, Anglo-Americanist thought initially imagined America as an Eden against the irredeemable decadence of European society, and...

Third Cinema appears to circulate in film studies as its ghostly non-object, the constitutive other that inaugurated much of the cultural political critique that has energized the field at large yet remains unacknowledged, repressed, disavowed. Many Third Cinema films enjoy currency in the field and inclusion in its syllabi, but they are rarely studied as Third Cinema per se; considerations of Third Cinema theory and criticism are even less likely.¹ The situation is similar in Asian American studies, where far more print has been devoted to commercial or First Cinema depictions of Asians and Asian Americans than to independently produced...

From the early 1970s through the late 1980s, Japanese Americans successfully mobilized to seek redress and reparations for their wrongful internment in concentration camps during the Second World War.¹ Led by the Sansei, or third-generation Japanese Americans, who came to political consciousness during the antiracist and anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, the movement’s efforts culminated in the passing of the American Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Consequently, the U.S. government publicly recognized the injustice of its wartime incarceration of over 110,000 Japanese Americans, officially apologized for its wrongful actions, and promised $20,000 in reparations to every internee still...

One of the most exciting and important developments in Asian American cinema has been the emergence of independently produced queer film and video. Since the early 1990s, cultural workers from marginalized communities have, responding to the relative paucity of public funding for the arts, increasingly turned to low-budget media production as a means of cultural and political expression. In recent years, Asian American queer artists—lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and others—have become leading actors in shaping the tenor and direction of independent media arts generally. This degree of media activity and visibility represents a phenomenon unimaginable twenty...