Topics in Ethnic American Lit

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Asian American film is really having a moment. From a Hollywood box-office smash to a bilingual film complete with English subtitles to a stake in the Marvel universe, Asian American films have become a more noticeable source of representation and information for a more expansive and mainstream audience than they ever have before. But texts, like these films, are not only “sites of information,” but are also “calculated productions and transmissions of knowledge” as scholar Laura Hyun Yi Kang has argued (“A Contending Pedagogy” 130). This course will examine several Asian American films not just as sites of information but as calculated productions in an attempt to understand how real cultural power is at work in the transmission of knowledge. We will do this, in part, by examining the following questions: What, exactly, is it about a film that makes it an Asian American film? How did a film tradition that began as a protest against negative representations of Asians by Hollywood come to embrace Hollywood? How have Asian and Asian American film artists navigated the unsettling line between personal agency and institutional restrictions, both behind and in front of the camera? What is the difference between cultural representation and cultural inclusion? How can artists and audiences redefine cultural authenticity as present and ever-evolving instead of antiquated and motionless? What role has genre played in the production of an Asian American film tradition? (silent film, documentary, short film, feature length film, independent film, animation, etc.) What role can consumers play in ensuring an even greater variety of Asian American perspectives in films moving forward, particularly in the realm of the SVOD (subscription video on demand) and TVOD (transactional video on demand) models?