Does media representation advance racial justice?

While the past decade has witnessed a push for increased diversity in visual media, Asians on Demand grapples with the pressing question of whether representation is enough to advance racial justice. Surveying a contemporary, cutting-edge archive of video works from the Asian diaspora in North America, Europe, and East Asia, this book uncovers the ways that diasporic artists challenge the narrow—and damaging—conceptions of Asian identity pervading mainstream media.

Through an engagement with grassroots activist documentaries, experimental video diaries by undocumented and migrant workers, and works by high-profile media artists such as Hito Steyerl and Ming Wong, Feng-Mei Heberer showcases contemporary video productions that trouble the mainstream culture industry’s insistence on portraying ethnic Asians as congenial to dominant neoliberal values. Undermining the demands placed on Asian subjects to exemplify institutional diversity and individual exceptionalism, this book provides a critical and nuanced set of alternatives to the easily digestible forms generated by online streaming culture and multicultural lip service more broadly.

Employing feminist, racial, and queer critiques of the contemporary media landscape, Asians on Demand highlights how the dynamics of Asian representation play out differently in Germany, the United States, Taiwan, and Spain. Rather than accepting the notion that inclusion requires an uncomplicated set of appearances, the works explored in this volume spotlight a staunch resistance to formulating racial identity as an instantly accessible consumer product.

Feng-Mei Heberer is assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University.

"Asians on Demand heralds an original, new voice in Asian diasporic media studies. Challenging the uncritical embrace of respectable, normative, 'ready-made' images of Asians on global screens, Feng-Mei Heberer directs our attention to exciting video installations, performance art, and documentaries by Asian filmmakers, artists, and activists that advance searing critiques of the Asian on Demand while also showcasing the erotics, pleasures, and 'political desires' of queer, feminist, and diasporic Asian subjects at the beginning of the twenty-first century."—Nguyen Tan Hoang, author of A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation

"Feng-Mei Heberer exposes the twinned logics of Asian racialization and transparent mediation, laying bare their complicity with contemporary neoliberal regimes of commodified diversity. Wonderfully nomadic in its exploration of video practices and rich with acerbic critique, Asians on Demand is an essential resource for an expanded critical cartography of media, diaspora, and race."—Steven Chung, author of Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-ok and Postwar Cinema