front cover of Countervisions
Countervisions
Darrell Hamamoto
Temple University Press, 2000
Spotlighting Asian Americans on both sides of the motion picture camera, Countervisions examines the aesthetics, material circumstances, and politics of  a broad spectrum of films released in the last thirty years. This anthology focuses in particular on the growing presence of Asian Americans as makers of independent films and cross-over successes. Essays of film criticism and interviews with film makers emphasize matters of cultural agency -- that is, the practices through which Asian American actors, directors, and audience members have shaped their own cinematic images.

One of the anthology's key contributions is to trace the evolution of Asian American independent film practice over thirty years. Essays on the Japanese American internment and  historical memory, essays on films by women and queer artists, and the reflections of individual film makers discuss independent productions as subverting or opposing the conventions of commercial cinema. But Countervisions also resists simplistic readings of "mainstream" film representations of Asian Americans and enumerations of negative images. Writing about Hollywood stars Anna May Wong and Nancy Kwan, director Wayne Wang, and erotic films, several contributors probe into the complex and ambivalent responses of Asian American audiences to stereotypical roles and commercial success. Taken together, the spirited, illuminating essays in this collection offer an unprecedented examination of a flourishing cultural production.
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front cover of Monitored Peril
Monitored Peril
Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation
Darrell Y. Hamamoto
University of Minnesota Press, 1994
The first major study of Asian American representation on U.S. television. Early in the movement of Asian labor to the United States, immigrants from the Far East were viewed by the dominant Euro-American society as a peril to a white, Christian nation. How far have we come since then? This first comprehensive study of Asian American representation on network television supplies some unsettling answers. A meticulous work of history, cultural criticism, and political analysis, Monitored Peril illuminates the unstable relationship between the discursive practices of commercial television programs, liberal democratic values, and white supremacist ideology. The book clearly demonstrates the pervasiveness of racialized discourse throughout U.S. society, especially as it is reproduced by network television. In treating his topic, Darrell Hamamoto addresses a wide variety of issues facing diverse Asian American communities: interracial conflict, conservative politics, U.S.-Japan trade friction, and postcolonial Vietnam. Through an examination of selected programs from the 1950s to the present, he attempts to correct the consistently distorted optic of network television. Finally, he calls for an engaged independent Asian American media practice, and for the expansion of public sector television. "Darrell Y. Hamamoto's critical and scholarly examination of Asians in television media serves as a stimulating and timely discourse on the state of Asian America within the strict boundaries known as American network television. Hamamoto presents a sophisticated solution to the problem of cultural misappropriation and false representation of Americans of Asian descent." --Pacific Reader "Darrell Y. Hamamoto makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of race, representation, and power with this comprehensive study of television programs about Asians and Asian Americans in the United States." --Journal of Asian American Studies Selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Darrell Y. Hamamoto is a lecturer in the program of comparative culture at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (1991).
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