Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video (review)

In the introduction to Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video, author Glen M. Mimura briefly mentions a classroom scenario that may be familiar to those who teach courses on Asian American media in film and communication programs—that of students expecting to watch “either films starring Jet Li, Beat Takeshi, Chow Yun Fat and Jackie Chan or else a parade of Hollywood titles that have shaped the legacy of enduring Orientalist stereotypes” (xiv). Dominant American cultural ideologies that routinely exchange “Asian” with “Asian American” and decode the racial “margins” only with a view to affirm its “center” are sharply critiqued by Mimura within the framework of film studies and Asian American studies. Rejecting dominant paradigms such as national cinemas and minorities in film, the latter constitutive of the very common “Asian images in US film” type of analyses, Mimura turns to a tradition that, by his own admission, has found strong favor within contemporary studies of Filipino/a American and South Asian American cultural studies.

Diaspora and Third Cinema—two concepts that have wide currency in studies of postcolonial and transnational media contexts and have been subject to rigorous critique and reworking—frame the book, whose intellectual goal is to recast the way we “grasp [Asian American cinema’s] discourse as an object of analysis” (xv). The first step in the reengagement is to mark the epistemological limits of dominant paradigms and foreground their cultural politics. In this context, Mimura addresses the problematic location of Asian American media in an intellectual and popular culture that frames debates for the most part in the binary mode of majority-minority, Hollywood-independent media and whites-racial others. In Asian American studies, Mimura cites Ronald Takaki’s work as an example of cultural analyses that problematically recuperate the migrant subject within a progress narrative that moves from histories of exclusion to one of inclusion, from racist ideologies to racialized community formations, and from silenced outsider to empowered citizen. The problem, Mimura notes, is that such historiography turns to hegemonic U.S. national myths to narrate Asian American subjecthood—myths such as manifest destiny, bumpy arrivals from “distant shores,” and smooth assimilation as panethnic groups into the great, white, heteronormative mainstream. Mimura joins a host of some old, some new, voices in cultural theory that have called attention to the fragile yet persistent boundaries of the nation-state, its tradition of violence as it seeks to rein in heterogeneity and contradiction for a veneer of homogeneity and/or ethnic absolutism, and, in the U.S. context, its liberal-pluralist vision of arrivals and inevitable assimilation.

Drawing on black British cultural studies, most notably, the interventions of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and James Clifford, chapter 1, “Diaspora or Modernity’s Other,” foregrounds the resourcefulness of diaspora “predicated on the recognition of historical experiences irreducible to the paradigms of the nationstate (narrative, political, cultural)” (14), as an analytical frame to reengage the category of Asian American. Hall’s notion of “new ethnicities” and Clifford’s “new localizing strategies,” which map out the dialectical relations between race, nation, and transnational formations, on the one hand, while, on the other hand, calling attention to cultural difference and identity formation that cannot be contained within the hegemonic boundaries of the patriarchal, heteronormative, white nation-state are especially relevant for Mimura’s interest in feminist and queer independent media “produced primarily by and for Asian Americans” (xv). Chapter 2, “In the Afterglow of Regenerative Violence,” is an argument for “Asian American media discourse, then as Third Cinema’s latter-day articulation, but also its critique and as a departure from it” (26). Discussing Third Cinema’s roots in the leftist cinematic practices of the postcolonial third world and its collective, collaborative, political project of challenging the material and symbolic order of the status quo, the chapter outlines some of the critiques of Third Cinema theory before advocating the critical...