Beyond an Asian settler cinema, text only

Beyond an Asian settler cinema:
Asian American media, PBS, and the settler colonial state

The history of Asian American media is inseparably intertwined with that of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the state-supported public broadcaster in the United States. Asian American media emerged as a grassroots movement that forged a style of social justice media on PBS that was usually understood as nothing if not “noble and uplifting and boring as hell” (Okada, 2015, p. 27). But far from being another dutiful, if sometimes bland, section of social justice media, I argue that Asian American media on PBS is more accurately understood as a settler colonial media movement, making claims to stolen land and citizenship within a settler colonial state, thus maintaining that state’s legitimacy.

PBS and Asian American media organizations exist in a sometimes-contentious symbiosis where PBS pushes a nationalist version of multiculturalism while Asian American media makers and organizations rely on PBS for funding and distribution, each helping guide the other’s direction. Conceptualizing Asian American media as settler colonial reveals the colonial politics motivating pervasive narrative, formal, and ideological conventions that appear neutral on their face. Films within the movement embrace multiculturalism to justify their demands for equality and redress for Asian Americans. However, multiculturalism, a statist model of pluralism, marginalizes indigenous peoples’ demands for sovereignty.

Such an embrace has been a condition of funding from PBS, which included advancing multiculturalism in its founding mandate. While Asian American media makers, frustrated by institutional timidity and conservativism, banded together to expand the limits of what could be included in this kind of state-sanctioned anti-racism, they ultimately collaborated with PBS’s multicultural nationalism to ensure reliable funding and distribution. In a well-meaning pursuit of racial justice, their work within PBS has perfected the state machine instead of smashing it. Inscribed in Asian American media and politics is a persistent settler colonial nationalism that undercuts radical decolonial critiques. Furthermore, attempts by some Asian American filmmakers on PBS to decisively disentangle their work from settler colonial nationalism only reveal the incapacity of the Asian American media movement's greatest patron to sustain such critiques. After a brief historical and conceptual overview, I will discuss three case studies that illustrate settler colonial rhetoric and aesthetics as a fundamental part of the political and formal approach of Asian American media on PBS. The three examples are drawn from three different genres and periods of Asian American media history so that the very structures undergirding Asian American media in general are clearly implicated.

Jun Okada (2015) traces the development of a symbiotic relationship between PBS and Asian American media from their beginnings. PBS was created as a non-commercial home for multiculturalism in the media after a 1967 report, Public Television: A Program for Action, decried the lack of diversity on television, and the first organized groups of Asian American filmmakers would create the content to realize that mission. In her early periodization of Asian American media history, Renee Tajima (1991) places PBS at the center of the movement’s development from an early phase of “urgent, idealistic” community filmmaking to a mature, commercially viable cinema of “institutionalization, pragmatism, and skills attainment”—owing to reliable funding and mass audience distribution from PBS (p. 14). Asian American filmmakers have, in turn, gone beyond content production to structurally shape PBS’s development, forming organizations like the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA, later renamed CAAM) and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) to lobby for PBS to stand by its original multicultural vision and increase funding for films by people of color (Okada, 2015). But that vision did not derive from seeking multiculturalism for its own sake, or from benevolence or humanitarian concern. It was formulated as part of a nationalist project, instrumentalized as a means to the overarching end of developing and maintaining a stable nation-state. Okada (2015) points out the language in A Program for Action that subsumes PBS’s goals within nationalism:

“[P]ublic television should ‘help us see America whole, in all its diversity.’ It should be a ‘mirror of the American style’ and ‘should remind us of our heritage and enliven our traditions.’ . . . Its programs ‘should help us know what it is to be many in one, to have growing maturity in our sense of ourselves as a people.’ It should, in short, be the ‘clearest expression of American diversity, and of excellence within diversity.’” (p. 1)

This language conflates a desired United States and its reality. That is, claiming diversity as fundamental to “the American style” contradicts the history of racism and persistent nativist definitions of “American.” Asian American media on PBS thus does the work of re-imagining the nation as multicultural, producing the cultural products through which, as Benedict Anderson (2006) suggests, the nation-state is constructed as an imaginary community. But as Okada (2015) has argued, this re-imagining remains in strict subservience to the state, either providing “positive images” of Asians living harmoniously under the state or airing grievances for the state to fix by instituting broader multiculturalism (p. 8).

At first glance, this multicultural formulation of the nation-state seems to be an enlightened version of Anderson’s principle of nations being necessarily exclusionary, or even an exception to it. Multiculturalism stands for pluralism, anti-racism, and an expansive diversity. The United States, however, is not just a nation-state, but a settler colonial state. In the U.S. imaginary, an exclusionary limitation persists in the denial of indigenous sovereignty over American land, replacing indigenous heritage and traditions with “our heritage” and “our traditions.” Mahmood Mamdani (2015) has made it clear that the distinctions between conventional colonialism/racism and settler colonialism allow the latter to live on regardless of the vitality of the former:

“The thrust of American struggles have been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state” (p. 607).

In fact, state-led deracialization—as in PBS—ideologically empowers settler colonialism, demoting indigenous peoples’ exceptional claim to sovereignty to that of only one of many cultural groups who hold equal rights to land and citizenship. In this case, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and all the other indigenous groups whose lands are occupied by the United States became represented on PBS as just one “historically established minority group” within the PBS Minority Consortia of five state-funded content producers, including NAATA (Okada, 2002, para. 4). The Minority Consortia manifested what Lorenzo Veracini (2011) has called “incorporation by recognition” that “primarily promotes the domestication of indigenous sovereignties for the benefit of the settler state” (p. 8).

In its drive towards institutionalization, pragmatism, and skills attainment, Asian American media on PBS has played its part in advancing multiculturalism and the vitality of the settler colonial state, inviting more non-native groups to see themselves as true Americans. For instance, Ancestors in the Americas (2001), a documentary directed by NAATA and ITVS founder Loni Ding, opens with its central question, “Who can claim America?” with the rest of the film making a case for Asian Americans to be able to make that claim with authoritative pride (2:00). Haunani-Kay Trask (2008/2000) issues a scathing rebuttal that points out the settler colonial logic in such pride:

“national identification as ‘American’ is national identification as a colonizer, someone who benefits from stolen Native lands and the genocide so well documented against America’s Native peoples” (p. 61).

For Trask, immigrants are settlers, too.

In what follows, I present three case studies. I consider Ancestors in the Americas as an example of settler colonial aesthetics, analyzing how it mobilizes film form and an aesthetic of hardship to narrate the neutralization and legitimization of settler identity at the heart of classic Asian American texts, such as Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams. I then turn to an episode of the PBS show The Great American Recipe (PBS/VPM, 2023) to discuss settler colonial aesthetics’ persistence and entrenchment in modern-day PBS. I finally offer Terminal USA (dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1994) as an example of an attempt for an alternative to multiculturalism, embracing a bottom-up, polycutural model of pluralism. Its harsh reception indicates the inability for PBS to withstand a rebuke of its nationalist mission.

Ancestors in the Americas

The two-part documentary Ancestors in the Americas follows the revisionist historiography of Gary Okihiro (2014/1994), an interviewee and advisor for the film. His seminal book Margins and Mainstreams situates the history of Asian American immigration within a broader history of colonialism in Asia. It traces Asia in the Western consciousness, arguing that Western colonialism has been yearning to dominate Asia even before Columbus set sail hoping to land there and framing the colonization of American Indians as a consequence of the West’s fascination with Asia. For Okihiro, Asia and its people have always been of fundamental importance to the United States and its history. He emphasizes that Asian Americans should not need to justify their presence within it, rejecting the view of Asian Americans as guests in a foreign land:

“Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. . . . Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia. And the matter of the ‘when and where’ of Asian American history is located therein, in Europe’s eastward and westward thrusts, engendered, transformative, expansive.” (pp. 28–29)

Connections between the histories of Asians and the settlement of the Americas draw out a “resemblance” (Okihiro, 2014/1994, p. 20) between the oppression of Asians and American Indians. But placing both groups’ experience under the one conceptualization of colonialism neglects their oppression’s specific nature. Just because Asians and American Indians suffered under the same oppressor does not mean they were oppressed in the same way. While Asia experienced the devastation of conventional colonialism, the indigenous peoples of U.S.-occupied territory suffer settler colonialism. While both kinds of colonialism are unquestionably detrimental structures that continue to shape power and its use, as Veracini (2011) points out,

“colonialism and settler colonialism are not merely different, they are in some ways antithetical formations.” (p. 3)

While conventional colonialism seeks to exploit labor and resources, settler colonialism seeks the permanent extirpation of a people from their land and their integration into the metropole. In removing the distinction between conventional and settler colonialism, the unique positionality and struggles of American Indians and other indigenous groups become subsumed into an Asian American framework.

Ancestors in the Americas converts Okihiro’s thesis to audiovisual form using a montage sequence beginning at 8:35 in Part 1. The sequence opens with a handheld shot pointed towards the sky, whirling around before settling on a canted framing of a Gothic, i.e. clearly Western, church bell tower paired with the sound of dissonant, chaotic church bells. Around two seconds into the roughly five-second shot, Okihiro’s voiceover explaining the Catholic church’s role in early colonialism joins these bells; both soundtrack elements construct a sound bridge joining the shot into another handheld, canted shot, now showing the entire facade of the church from a wider shot scale and canted in the opposite direction as the previous shot. This shot lasts for only four seconds before a dissolve and sound bridge to a third shot, now of archival material depicting a member of the Catholic clergy looking towards the right of the screen with hands in prayer. The bells form a sound bridge over a fade to a shot of Okihiro being interviewed. Within a few seconds, this shot dissolves amidst a sound bridge of Okihiro’s voice to a shot of a person looking away from the viewer and towards the left of the frame, where a mountain rises above a blanket of mist. Although it is not explicitly mentioned that this person is indigenous, the context, music, and editing evince that they represent and stand in for the indigenous people of the Americas. Fluttering flute music associated with some indigenous cultures of the Americas begins just before Okihiro says the words “indigenous people.” The following shot, of a farmer driving an ox and plow through an alpine field, uses the Kuleshov effect to give the viewer the impression that the indigenous person was staring wistfully at their land which is now being exploited for agriculture. The farmer, ox, and plow move from the left, back of the screen towards the right side and closer to the camera, opposing the indigenous person’s gaze, an opposition accentuated by the previous shot panning from the indigenous person to the mountain they are staring at, right to left. The plowing dissolves to an archival colonial map of the Americas which zooms in as Sab Shimono, playing the part of an imaginary Asian American ancestor, begins a voiceover that asks, “Why did we come to America? Look not to Asia for the reason. Look to the West.” Midway through this voiceover, the map dissolves to a shot of moving water, combined with rushing water sounds, which then dissolves to a yellow-tinted shot of an Asian immigrant, their identity clearly communicated by their straw hat, looking, like the indigenous person, away from the viewer and towards the left of the frame.

The editing and mise-en-scene of this sequence articulates an analysis of colonial political economy within forty seconds. Specifically, eyeline matches create dialectical oppositions and solidarities: the clergy and the farmer look to the right while the indigenous person and the Asian immigrant look to the left. And, with a gaze away from the viewer, they look towards the land they will lose, in the former case, and toil in, in the latter case. Significantly, most maps represent west on the left and east on the right. Here, the clergy and the farmer look from the West towards the East, and the indigenous person and Asian immigrant look from the East towards the West. Besides providing a dichotomy of Western colonizer and Eastern colonized, the indigenous person and Asian immigrant do this with their backs turned to the camera; their lack of expression provides the fertile ground for grafting feelings of trepidation onto them through the Kuleshov effect. Sound also contributes, creating a contrast between the cacophonous church bells, perhaps hinting at the violence of Western colonialism alongside the clashing church shots, and the serene flute sounds that are shared by both Native and Asian immigrant subjects. If we look at this sequence as a miniature version of colonial political economy, its sounds and images advance a conflation of the experiences of Native peoples and Asian Americans, and any distinction between settler and conventional colonialism is elided.

The anti-racist project of Margins and Mainstreams extends beyond connecting Asian Americans and American Indians; it also envisions African Americans and other people of color as “kindred people” to Asian Americans (Okihiro, 2014/1994, p. 34). While such a sentiment is a necessary and crucial intervention against anti-blackness among Asian Americans, the mechanism used to achieve it remains stubbornly tied to Asian settlers’ participation in the settler colonial state. Okihiro sees the grounds for solidarity as one of a shared history of being “forged in the fire of white supremacy and struggle” (p. 34). The permanence of Asian settlement is thus championed as proof that Asian Americans’ persistence against racism bettered the United States:

“Asians resisted their exclusion and marginalization and thereby enlarged the range and deepened the meaning of American democracy.” (p. 156)

This idea is echoed in the structure of the first part of Ancestors in the Americas, subtitled Coolies, Sailors and Settlers to reflect the narrative progression from ruthlessly oppressed migrant laborers to “brave [Asians who] survived, took root, and made a home” (47:10). Permanent settlement stands as a culmination, the achievement of becoming American after so much hardship, and a happy ending to Part 1. The second part further celebrates the ways Asians helped build the U.S. state, from illustrious careers in the military to opening new land to farming. As one interviewee puts it, “California’s economic development in the 19th century could not have been accomplished without the Chinese” (101:45). Retooling Okihiro’s words, another interviewee lauds Asian Americans’ upholding and expanding “the promise of the American dream” (118:30).

In writing on Asian settler colonialism in Hawai’i, Candace Fujikane (2008) responds to Okihiro in particular and the rhetoric of American democracy in general:

“[T]he violence of American colonialism is ideologically transformed into ‘democracy,’ masking the realities of a settler colony that continues to deny Native peoples their rights to their lands and resources. . . . [Okihiro’s] affirmation of U.S. democracy actually serves the ends of the United States as a settler state and its occupation of Native lands.” (p. 3)

Fujikane offers the potent example of Hawai’i, where Asian Americans have become the largest racial group and won political representation after struggling against racist regimes. Newly empowered Asian Hawaiian leaders have refused Native Hawaiian demands for sovereignty and political power, used the legal system to strip away Native Hawaiian land, and co-opted Native identity even as Native Hawaiians suffer high levels of poverty. The island’s history provides another example of how the settler colonial state has continued under multiculturalism—only the settlers in charge have changed race (Fujikane, 2008). Solidarity, in other words, is not a natural corollary of history. It must work in a deeper way than pointing out similarities and inserting indigenous struggle into an Asian American framework. Fujikane speaks to this point:

“[There are] dangers of settlers who see themselves as ‘helping’ Hawaiians by attempting to direct the sovereignty process or ‘advising’ Native peoples how they should conduct their struggles. . . . If settler scholars and activists seek to support [Native peoples] in their political struggles, settlers must stand behind Natives.” (Fujikane, 2008, p. 30)

Indeed, Ancestors in the Americas features Asian American scholars discussing settler colonial history and invoking the sound and image of indigenous people without any indigenous scholars, activists, or voices speaking for themselves.

Struggle impels narratives of achievement through struggle, so Ancestors in the Americas dedicates significant formal energy to depicting the horrifying suffering historically endured by Asian Americans. Symbolic motifs and affective imagery establish Asian Americans as downtrodden, earning their right to be American through hardship. Two such visual motifs depict an Asian sojourner and moving water. The Asian sojourner first appears early in the film, at 4:43, in a canted shot of an Asian man in Chinese dress climbing dirt stairs. Representing the collective experiences of many Asian American ancestors, the voiceover declares, “I am voyaging still,” as the man lumbers up the steps. Here the synecdoche is accentuated by obscuring the character’s facial features with a hat. The canted angle makes the steps appear almost impossibly steep, and slow motion makes their length laborious. Rhythmic noises of dirt crunching while stepped on and gusts of wind fill an otherwise barren soundtrack with the shot’s color draining away to black and white; the entire audiovisual ensemble stresses difficulty and displeasure. This shot is then repeated in Part 2, when a similarly dressed character returns, now with individualized facial features but still in black and white.

Canting and slow motion also shape the presentation of the water motif, with one formally complex shot at 9:25 repeating multiple times, such as at 37:25. The shot’s visual track shows frothy whitewater disturbed by an Asian immigrant’s boat; that it is from an immigrant’s boat is confirmed by the following shot of the boat’s deck. A shaking handheld camera mirrors and complements the turbulence of the water, which fills the screen through the canted angle. Sounds of rushing water complete the symbolic depiction of the migrant’s strenuous journey. This is but one of the many shots of water throughout the film. Those that do not repeat a previous figuration still rhyme with each other; the water is always moving, and many shots use slow motion. Some show waves crashing onto a coast; others have the camera gliding atop open water which fills the frame. The many ways water is filmed place emphasis on the enormous lengths Asian migrants traveled.

Some scenes use pathos-infused imagery to elicit sympathy both for those that suffered and for the need for redress. One scene beginning at 44:06 edits together shots portraying suffering and grueling labor: muddy feet, a black and white and slow motion shot of laborers walking down a road in the rain, another black and white and slow motion shot of a line of laborers, and a freeze frame on a grimacing child clutching metal bars. Although these shots were filmed in South China, thousands of miles away from the atrocities the scene narrates, they read as reenactments since they are matched with a voiceover describing early Chinese Americans’ testimonies of inhumane working conditions. Divorced from the images’ subjects, these people’s aesthetic representation is used for its emotional effect.

The earlier dialectic linking Asian Americans and American Indians against colonizers persists: an illustration of a stern-looking white foreman holding a crop precedes the image of muddy feet, and every shot of workers mentioned above shows their backs turned to the camera, rhyming with the poses of the indigenous person and Asian immigrant. Choices of archival footage also prolong that dialectic through pathos. A montage at 11:35 offers a parade of photos of grinning, well-dressed white men, panning through each of their faces, before fading to the same kind of pan through a photo of Asian workers, again with their backs turned to the viewer, bent down harvesting sugarcane.

Once again, an eloquent and forceful response to the elisions in this kind of representation comes from Fujikane (2008), who rejects the instrumentalization of hardship as navel-gazing politics:

“Honoring the struggles of those who came before us, however, also means resisting the impulse to claim only their histories of oppression and resistance. . . . The early Asian settlers were both active agents in the making of their own histories and unwitting recruits swept into the service of empire. As we are inspired by our family histories of struggle, we also recognize that the suffering of those who came before us does not change the fact that they entered into a settler colony. . .” (p. 7)

The Great American Recipe

The aesthetic of hardship used in Ancestors in the Americas provides an ideological spectacle, one that masks more complex realities in favor of essentialist sympathies. In its righteous revisionist pursuit of anti-racism, it devotes aesthetic energy towards upholding the settler colonial state, an ideological project alive and well in modern-day PBS. If anything, recent protests from filmmakers of color struggling for funding amid the diminished influence of ITVS and the Minority Consortia suggest that PBS is losing even its anti-racist edge (Deggins, 2021). In this light, the TV series The Great American Recipe, an “uplifting cooking competition that celebrates the multiculturalism that makes American food unique and iconic” (PBS, n.d., para. 1), which aired its second season in 2023, reveals PBS’s current ideological orientation—an unthreatening liberalism where confrontation and conflict do not exist. Any acknowledgement of history and racism gets individualized, narrated as subjective family memories to be cherished instead of traumas to be reckoned with.

The way PBS achieves its multicultural utopia has been reconfigured into narratives that maintain an already existing harmonious status quo instead of ones that fight to correct the injustices preventing an ideal America. The cast of The Great American Recipe consist of a carefully assembled ethnic smorgasbord. Thus, for Season 2 Episode 6, the host is Puerto Rican Alejandra; Filipina and Jewish Leah, white Graham, and Black Tiffany make up the panel of judges; and the contestants are Greek Ted, Jewish Abbe and Brad, Caribbean Leanna, Native American Maria, Guyanese Salmah, Native Hawaiian Relle, and Khela, who describes herself as simply “from the Midwest” (7:20). Salmah wins the episode with her mithai, a dessert “brought from India to Guyana from my grandmother’s great-grandmother,” (37:20) making her the latest of “a long line of ladies who are famous for their mithai,” (28:30) an encapsulation of her “family legacy” (46:20).

In fact, mithai is also the legacy of hundreds of thousands of Indians who arrived in British Guiana as indentured servants replacing freed slaves for planters desperate for a laboring underclass whom they could dominate (Rabe, 2005). Those who could work were routinely worked to death, and those who did not do fieldwork faced rape and murderous pogroms, a pattern that continued after independence and to this very day, owing to the race-baiting Forbes Burnham dictatorship. Political and cultural leaders who called for the Black and Indian working classes to join hands, like Walter Rodney, were assassinated. Yet, as celebrated in this television program, the dish mithai survived in Caribbean cuisine against all odds. The larger history is not even alluded to in The Great American Recipe, perhaps because it would complicate its rose-tinted view of the U.S. state, which backed Forbes Burnham (Rabe, 2005). Instead, the judges speak of how they “loved the story” as they “experience new flavors” (52:30) when they explain their choice of winner, localizing its significance to a family story.

As in Ancestors in the Americas, the two indigenous contestants melt into an undifferentiated stew with the other people of color. However, The Great American Recipe does this through showcasing difference, not similarity. The indigenous contestants’ costumes are visibly different, with Maria sporting beadwork earrings and Relle wearing flowers in her hair, both signs of pride in their unique cultural identities. But for Veracini (2011), this imagery reinvigorates the settler colonial project:

“Alas, as the politics of indigenous recognition and reconciliation institute a framework designed to manage and neutralize indigenous difference, the new dispensation primarily promotes the domestication of indigenous sovereignties for the benefit of the settler state” (p. 8).

As Maria and Relle enthusiastically explain how their cuisine and culture are unique, their enthusiasm also supports the “Great America” that occupies their land; they do not just participate in the settler colonial state but become its poster child. The contestants compete to be featured on a cover of a Great American Recipe cookbook. Their cultures are presented as equally illustrious and important, with no distinction between settler and native. All make equal claim to America, so indigenous culture is simply one dish in a bountiful spread where each part makes the settler colonial state even more delicious. More importantly, all the dishes are presented as pairing well together, strengthening the ideological project of settler colonial nationhood. A wide shot at 1:48 uses mise-en-scene to emphasize the cohesion of the contestants as they walk towards the competition building set against the Virginia countryside. The entire imagined community walks as a tightly bunched whole, occupying just one-tenth of the horizontal space of the shot and less than one-fifth of the vertical space. The episode ends as it began, with pure harmony. Khela and Salmah hug each other in the final shot in the competition space, an interracial reconciliation that makes no distinction between colonizer and any kind of colonized (53:20).

As in Ancestors in the Americas, affective imagery becomes crucial to reaching ideological ends. The opening sequence, for instance, is 70 seconds of resplendent ideological spectacle. It begins with the camera tracking and panning above a long table filled with plates of food shared by the cast (0:30) while a narrator begins to announce that “this is the Great American Recipe.” This voiceover is used as a sound bridge, cutting to Tiffany, Leah, and Alejandra laughing. Later in the sequence, Graham makes the nationalist intent clear when he reflects, “this shows us what we are all about, the great American recipe highlighting all the diversity” (1:05) between shots of contestants and judges with tears flowing down their faces, moved by the stories of family history and traditions. The sequence culminates in shots of supportive elation, applause, and excitement for the winners (1:25), completing the full gamut of emotions, all explicitly tied to the U.S. state.

The emotional arc of the opening sequence presages the use of affective imagery to indicate the episode’s narrative structure. Episode 6 is split into two challenges, each a performance of multicultural relationality occupying around half the episode. Each challenge requires contestants to delve into their own family traditions while learning from the cultures of the other contestants in a three-part process:

the host and judges introduce the challenge,
the contestants struggle and support each other as they complete the challenge,
all the contestants triumph in the end.

Even the less successful dishes provide a deeper appreciation for other cultures and family stories. For example, roughly halfway through the first challenge, Khela begins to cry when she tastes how Salmah used a Caribbean technique to improve the chili she made for her deceased father. It is an emotional climax for the challenge, a sudden affective escalation that pierces through otherwise emotionally neutral scenes of contestants cooking, joking, and learning about the dishes. During the judging, the chili is tasted last, giving a recapitulation of bittersweet memories, along with Khela’s tears, a privileged narrative position at the close of the first half of the episode. The last three shots of the first challenge are of Salmah running back towards Khela, embracing her, and swaying back and forth. Other contestants join in the hug, each at a successively closer shot scale, rhyming with a similar hug that closes the second challenge and the episode. The lesson imparted is that cultural exchange is emotionally charged but ultimately orderly and uncomplicatedly wholesome.

Although difficult to classify as Asian American media in its strictest senses, Asian Americans are a prominent part of The Great American Recipe on and off the screen. Asian Americans are among the show’s producers, for instance, and Filipina American judge Leah is one of its most salient presences. Here Leah praises Leanna’s cou-cou and snapper as “Barbados in a bowl” (48:35). The dish, for Leah, would not be as good without Leanna’s identity and immigrant family story, a particularly literal example of bell hooks’s (2015/1992) charge that “[w]ithin commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice” (p. 21). There is an Othering reductionism in Leah’s quip: through the rules of commodity culture, multifaceted Barbados gets reduced to a bowl of food, and the expansive Afro-Caribbean history of cou-cou gets reduced to the limited territory of Barbados. Indeed, the premise of the show rests on each dish serving as an authentic representative of a delimited culture, a concept critiqued by Martin F. Manalansan IV (2013) as “a kind of constructed ‘settled-ness’” that denies actual subjects’ porous negotiation of identity through history and conflicting, complex experiences (p. 297). For Vijay Prashad (2001), multiculturalism itself needs the concept of authenticity since it relies on “an idea of culture wherein culture is bounded into authentic zones” (p. 61). Multiculturalism’s use for nationalist ends is not incidental, as the concept of multiculuralism always defers to a benevolent central authority under which diverse people unify:

“Multiculturalism is a principle for the regulation of social life from above, one that can only fitfully find itself in the sorts of struggles that produce the values of interaction from below” (Prashad, 2001, p. 40).

Both Manalansan and Prashad view these tendencies of multiculturalism as something to be resisted, with Prashad, drawing from earlier work by Robin D. G. Kelley, proposing an alternative: polyculturalism. On one hand, polyculturalism defends the living history of culture against its completion, rejecting a “static view. . . with cultures already forged” (Prashad, 2001, p. 66). Cultural boundaries become understood as constructed, with each supposedly discrete culture the product of a continuous process of hybridity and exchange with other cultures. On the other hand, the concept of polyculturalism indicates a radical, aspirational proposal of cultural relationality forged through actual acts of solidarity, a bottom-up model for structuring society. Diversity does not come as something received from the state, but something gained through inhabiting the same spaces, learned through communion and disagreement, and built through struggling with each other against both common and unique enemies. As a bottom-up model, it is always messy, incomplete, and completely unfetishized, acknowledging all cultures’ equal beauty and ugliness.

Terminal USA

Terminal USA is all of those things. The ITVS-financed film about a Japanese American family is filled with the abject and the scatalogical. In terms of its reception, a New York Times critic described it as “anarchic” upon its PBS premiere (Grimes, 1994, para. 1), while Okada (2015) retrospectively evaluated it as “a significant break in the tradition of injury, history, and memory in Asian American film and video made for public television” (p. 69). The film directly mocks the multicultural concept of culture as consisting of discrete objects to be preserved and appreciated by developing characters like Dad, a hypermasculine patriarch obsessed with purity. Dad receives racist death threats at his industrial job, but his absurd reaction focuses anger not on the death threat, but on his coworkers’ inability to discern between Chinese and Japanese:

“Jesus, I can’t believe they still think I’m a chink. I am not a chink, I’m a jap! We’re japs! Chink is not the same as jap, there’s a big, big difference” (12:00).

Dad’s three children, Kazumi, Marvin, and Holly, also read as parodies of positive, uplifting, and appreciative images of Asian Americans. Punk Kazumi and well-behaved mama’s boy Marvin are both played by director Jon Moritsugu, a nod to a ludicrous split personality between positive and negative Asian. Holly is an uncanny version of a perfect high school girl, a cheerleader with streamers atop curled hair, rhinestones adorning her clothes, and seven hairbands on one arm.

The three children are revealed to have hybrid identities, becoming more polycultural than multicultural. Unlike his father, Kazumi has no problem crossing the border between Japanese and Chinese, wryly replying to Marvin’s entreaty to go to a hospital with, “Confucius say, hospitals are for pussies” (36:20). His hedonistic, easy-come-easy-go lifestyle is more informed by his loyalty to the punk subculture than to any fundamentally Japanese or Asian American cultural values. Marvin appears to be the perfect model minority, but his secret attraction to skinhead men is just as important to him as his studying. In addition, the homophobia Marvin faces from his parents when they discover his sexuality is a frank, unfetishized treatment of Asian Americans’ capacity for bigotry. Holly’s identity is fractiously defined by relationships with her fellow cheerleaders, a purity-demanding Dad, an oafish white jock boyfriend Rex, and a manipulative sex predator Tom Sawyer the Lawyer. The contours of being Asian American undeniably influence the entire family, but this is depicted mainly through the pathology of racist stereotypes. Such stereotypes include the model minority myth in Marvin’s case and the submissive China doll in Holly’s case. Both characters suffer a total mental collapse at the end of the film after struggling with the dissonance between keeping up a stereotype and escaping to their true, hybrid self. Marvin pleads, “You’re here to take me away, right? You’re here to rescue me?” (52:35) when skinheads invade the home, and Holly ends the film by leaving home with Tom Sawyer the Lawyer.

Manalansan (2013) views rejecting authenticity to be an

“historically and cultural[ly] negotiated state and process of emotional discomfort and affective refusal to adhere to an easy mapping of identity.” (p. 297)

As such, Terminal USA is laden with affective imagery, but rather than evoking pathos, as in Ancestors in the Americas and Great American Recipe, the sounds and images are uncanny, irreverent, and rambunctious. Bursts of anger and screams of horror flaunt the aspect of spectacle, formally emphasized to bawdy effect and sometimes turned into visual gags. For example, a montage juxtaposes Holly’s screaming face being zoomed in and out on and shots of similar zooms on a burning cross. The film has many more examples of dialectical editing, but most take the form not of montage, but of scenes intercut for ironic effect. A scene of Dad asking Holly not to perform sex acts for Tom Sawyer the Lawyer is periodically interrupted by a scene where her mother promises sexual favors to a pizza delivery man.

Terminal USA does not explicitly name settler colonialism, but it invokes its cinematic expression. The iconography of the American settler enmeshes Holly and Dad as they try to conform to stereotypes, morphing their appearances with costumes reminiscent of the genre of the Western. As Holly embraces Tom Sawyer the Lawyer’s perversity and disobeys her father, she abandons her cheerleader outfit to adopt flamboyant red, white, and blue clothes, including a cowboy hat, boots, and toy guns. Her shirt and skirt now have long fringes reminiscent of the traditional clothing of the peoples indigenous to the Great Plains. But that attire that was also adopted by the frontiersman of what is now the Western United States and their perennially popular reenactments of their atrocities and killings of American Indians in “Wild West shows” that informed the Western as a film genre (Benshoff & Griffin, 2009). In this way, Holly has fulfilled the China doll stereotype as she becomes fully, cartoonishly American, but a way of being American that is also indelibly tied to settler colonial violence and its glorification. A few minutes later, Dad, preparing to resort to violence to protect the family from impurity, retrieves a gun, and a cowboy hat materializes on his head (39:00). As an Asian American family, the characters in Terminal USA must negotiate between and beyond conflicting dualities that include not only untenable positive/negative stereotypes and the hybridization of two cultures, but also the narratives of the immigrant, with its histories of striving for prosperity in new lands through hardship, and the settler, with its histories of breaking generational bonds with land through violence and dispossession. The former narrative suggests a righteous multicultural enrichment, but pursuing it requires being folded into the latter’s legacy, unwittingly or not. Dad’s cowboy hat also unwittingly appears on his head, where he is without the hat in one shot and is wearing the hat in the next. Terminal USA, it develops into murderous delusions as Dad engages in a bloody rampage at the climax of the film.

ITVS and PBS paid dearly for their transgressive diversion from multiculturalism. Critics cited in the New York Times (Grimes, 1994) called Terminal USA and other ITVS programming “disappointing” (para. 11) and “so poorly made that they’re embarrassing for PBS to put on the air” (para. 19), glossing offensive content as low quality. Many stations refused to air the film, and outrage even reached Congress, where conservatives sought to cut or eliminate ITVS’s funding (Grimes, 1994). Such was the end of an experiment to “complicate simplistic notions of positive-image multiculturalism” (Okada, 2015, p. 65): the state simply could not sustain a polycultural threat to its control.

Complicating multiculturalism, in other words, means severing the settler colonial state’s strategy for managing difference. Anarchic Terminal USA accordingly opened a discursive space for challenges to settler colonial media. Just as the early Asian American media movement came to PBS for access to resources and distribution, Moritsugu’s path to PBS was motivated out of a need for financial stability. His previous film was a commercial failure, and he was working a minimum wage job when ITVS offered him $9,000 to submit a script and $365,000 to produce it (Stevenson, 2003). Unlike the Asian American media movement’s mainstream, however, Terminal USA refused to accede to PBS’s multicultural mandate but nonetheless sought to use PBS distribution to bring larger audiences and attention to a confrontational counternarrative. The contrast between this counternarrative and the revisionisms of Ancestors in the Americas and The Great American Recipe brings into sharp relief the organized Asian American media mainstream’s fraught cooperation with PBS for continued financial backing while also demonstrating a viable alternative for Asian American media making that does not resort to either state-supported institutionalization or commercial privatization.

Perhaps those Congressional conservatives were more genuinely protective of the U.S. state than their opponents gave them credit for: Terminal USA does name the state in its title, after all, and the image of that state it provides is an utter repudiation of “excellence within diversity.” By bending the ideological boundaries of PBS, the film is also a rebellion against a structure of the state that has legitimized settlers and their claims, rhetorically strengthened settler colonialism, and sidelined Native people as a manageable minority. That structure nurtured the Asian American media movement, and the Asian American media movement helped steer it in return; the history of Asian American media becomes complicated by its complicity.

Epilogue: Whither Asian American media?

“We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but restore it to a state which is still mystified.” (Barthes, 1972, p. 159)

In 2022, the Criterion Collection announced that they would be releasing Wayne Wang’s films Chan is Missing (1982) and Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985) for the former’s fortieth anniversary (Yu, 2022). Asian American media suddenly entered the canon. But no matter how many supplemental materials contextualizing the films’ creation and original reception come packaged with the disk, they are now given over as objects of cinephilia, sanctified with respect as fine art, and, thus, their original ideological impact is mystified. In fact, viewers of Chan is Missing in 1982 did not watch a flawless, restored Blu-ray. They “perched on the rickety chairs” at underground spaces amongst a tight-knit community of Asian American filmmakers and activists interested in building a movement, not just an art (Tajima, 1991, p. 10). In this light, the current “restoration” is a partial one, bringing back only the aesthetics without the revival of the radical Asian American politics that accompanied it. Undoubtedly, more classics of Asian American film and video will join Chan is Missing.

It was in part a reaction to this omission of radicality that I programmed Asian American Media in Winter 2023, a nine-week series of films and videos at Doc Films co-programmed with Tien-Tien Jong and co-sponsored with a grant from the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Resisting the rhetoric of the retrospective, I presented the screenings as a confrontational, critical, and politicized experience, staging introductions and teach-ins that tied the films’ content to political struggles happening in the city and world around us. Some films were counter-programmed against other films, and the dialectic of different styles and radical ideologies opened possibilities for conversation and strategizing. By refusing to sanctify the films under a unified narrative, we hoped that the spirit of the movement, full of self-critique and dissent, would be kept more intact than if the films were shown as singular masterpieces or otherwise artful objects. History and theory were combined with praxis, calling attention to action possibilities amidst a tumultuous municipal election where I served as precinct captain on two socialist City Council campaigns. The final screening was on election night, when our progressive coalition won a historic, hard-fought victory.

In closing, I clarify the intentions of this essay, which was developed from ideas in the Asian American Media series along with community and conversation with the spectator-interlocutors present at the screenings. I seek an Asian American politics that is more nuanced, more radical, and more dutiful in its solidarity. Twenty years ago, Vicente M. Diaz (2004) reminded us that “under no circumstance should Pacific Islanders, or Pacific Islands Studies, be subsumed under the institutional framework of Asian American history and experiences” (184). Yet the rise of political monikers like “AAPI,” as if solidarity with Pacific Islanders means simply inserting their name after our own, shows that his warning needs to be forcefully reiterated. Attacking Loni Ding’s work is, paradoxically, a way of respecting and reviving her fierce call for collective liberation because it enables an intervention against the depoliticization of Asian American media and the timidity of Asian American politics. It was Ding who, in 1991, prescribed the “necessity of taking an oppositional stance” for Asian American media; there would be no Asian American media movement without a persistent call for it to do better (p. 54). Today, as an Asian American comprador used the language of social justice to mow down affirmative action, as Donald Trump counts on support in the country’s Chinatowns, as persistent anti-Blackness fuels Asian Americans’ support for the carceral state, and as, despite it all, inspirational Asian American organizers heed the calls of labor struggle, immigrant justice, and #LandBack, Ding’s words must be heard again; depoliticized canonization akin to reissuing Chan is Missing must be refused. I pierce the heart of Asian American media and its settler colonial project out of deep admiration for the very activist filmmakers who were part of it, whose ideological legacy I seek to liberate and enliven, precisely through urgent discomfort and dislodgement.

There is no question that diverse media images are good, but the question remains. Will we allow this diversity to be the boon of a settler colonial, capitalist state, or will we challenge that state for control over our ability to envision a future of communion and deep acts of solidarity? Will we be complacent with leaving history as it is, or will we use it to continue the fervor and demands for a better world that our forebears began for us?

Notes

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed immensely to this essay. Tien-Tien Jong Barale-Zhang not only shepherded my work by co-programming my film series but was also a tirelessly generous reader of my work. I could rely on Tien-Tien’s inimitable mind to be faster than mine in catching errors in my reasoning and sharper than mine in posing ever more challenging questions to wrestle with. I also extend my sincere gratitude to Derek Long for having been an incredible mentor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and beyond. Derek’s comments were crucial in the drafting process, and his enthusiasm gave me the most powerful thing a young scholar can have: belief in myself and the quality of my work. Julie Turnock also provided invaluable feedback that polished my overenthusiastic political energy into an academic text shining with clarity. Maryam Kashani introduced me to many of the ideas in this essay, and taking her class sent me down a life-changing path of grappling with the conflicts between immigration and settler colonialism. I am also indebted to Doc Films, the student film society at the University of Chicago, for showing my Asian American Media film series. The best ideas can only come from collective thought, and Doc provided a space and an audience of interlocutors who received my ideas with critical warmth. I thank those spectator-interlocutors who entertained my rambling experimentation, allowing me to weed out trite ideas and focus my argument. I am grateful to Julia Lesage and an anonymous reviewer for their service; I was overjoyed to read comments that clearly came from deep wells of knowledge on Asian American media. Last but far from least, my partner Hiya Chetia was always the first to look over a paragraph I was struggling with or debate a contentious claim I was making. I am proud to have such a curious partner in my life and my work, always ready to support me when I’m wronged and bring me back to my senses when someone else was right all along.

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