Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video

This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history, how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America. Peter X Feng considers a wide range of films - from feature film genres such as romantic comedies and the detective film to ethnographic film, documentaries, avant-garde video, the newsreel, travelogues, even home movies. Feng begins by examining movies about three crucial moments that defined the American nation and the roles that Asian Americans would play in it: the arrival of Chinese and Japanese women in the Old West and Hawai'i; the incorporation of the Philippines into the U. S. empire; and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Succeeding chapters discuss cinematic depictions of ideological conflicts among Asian Americans and of the complex forces that compel migration, extending his nuanced analysis of the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationalist movements. Throughout Identities in Motion, Asian American identity emerges as constantly in motion, expressing the diversity and complexity of Asian Americans - including Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and Koreans -from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Locating Asian American Cinema in Discontinuity 1 I. Myths of Origin Ethnography, Romance, Home Movies 1. The Camera as Microscope: Cinema and Ethnographic Discourse 23 2. Pioneering Romance: Immigration, Americanization, and Asian Women 38 3. Articulating Silence: Sansei and Memories of the Camps 68 II. Travelogues 4. Decentering the Middle Kingdom: ABCs and the PRC 103 5. Lost in the Media Jungle: Tiana Thi Thanh Nga's Hollywood Mimicry 128 III. Performing Transformation 6. Becoming Asian American: Chan Is Missing 151 7. We're Queer! We're Where? Locating Transgressive Films 170 8. Paying Lip Service: Narrators in Surname Viet Given Name Nam and The Joy Luck Club 191 Afterword: The Asian American Muse 209 Notes 215 Bibliography 259 Index 287

About the Author :
Peter X Feng is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware. He is the editor of Screening Asian Americans.

Review :
"If you read nothing else about film, read this introduction. Feng's questions about identity -- who defines it, how it's defined, whether it can even be defined -- will make you watch films in a whole new way."--Terry Hong, AsianWeek "Feng provides a valuable investigation of the 'complex relationship of identity to the cinematic apparatus' through Asian American representation."--E. C. Ramirez, Choice Hong review also ran in Push >, newsletter of NAATA. Listed in Yale Alumni Magazine, CHE, Asian Cinema Weekly. Also reviewed in University of Delaware faculty newspaper and CHOICE.