Asian America through the Lens

Jun Xing is Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Difference, Power and Discrimination Program at Oregon State University. Trained as a cultural historian, he specializes in U.S. immigration history, American ethnicity, popular culture, and the history of cultural relations between the United States and East Asia. Dr. Xing is the author of Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender and Sexuality through Film, and Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919-1937.

While some Asian American films and filmmakers are beginning to achieve acclaim in mainstream U.S. culture, neither academic scholars nor society as a whole has sufficiently taken account of the history of this rich and growing body of cinematic production. In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing accomplishes the colossal task of surveying Asian American cinema for the first time, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge. Unique insight into Asian American experience in both mainstream and alternative film production is provided by textual analysis as well as by the voices of filmmakers and actors themselves. With constant attention to the specificities of Asian American histories and cultures, Xing engages a broad range of issues and theoretical perspectives, drawing insight from such bodies of scholarship as African American and Latino film studies, Marxian cultural theory, ethnic studies and the politics of representation, and post-structuralist and feminist discourses.

chapter 1 I: Introduction 1. Cultural Essentialism and Asian American Films chapter 2 2. Between a Weapon and a Formula chapter 3 3. Asian American Aesthetics chapter 4 II: Cinematic Asian Representation 1. Representation as Image chapter 5 2. Politics of Representation chapter 6 3. The Institution of Representation chapter 7 III. Documentaries as Social History 1. History as Subject: Personal Diary Films and Family Portraits chapter 8 2. History As Consciousness: Biographies and Communal Histories chapter 9 3. History as Representation: Social-Issue Documentaries chapter 10 IV: Hybrid Cinema by Asian American Women 1. Avant-Garde Film as History chapter 11 2. Time and Subjectivity chapter 12 3. Screen Space as Social Space chapter 13 V: Conclusion 1. A Cinema in Transition: "Cross-Over" Films chapter 14 2. Films from the Asian Diaspora chapter 15 Appendix: Theories on Ethnicity and Film chapter 16 Notes chapter 17 Bibliography chapter 18 Filmography chapter 19 Index