“Fictive” Ethnicity, Anamorphosis, and the Radical Potential of Asian American Film

The actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is . . . a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.

—Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature

Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, the editors of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), have pointed out that the weakening sovereignty of the nation-state as an economic and political unit over the last forty years—a period that has seen a declining national economy, the spread of neoliberalism, and a rising wave of patriotism—requires a critical rethinking of the term “Asian American,” which should no longer be regarded as a “static epistemological object.”¹ According to them, the need for “new epistemologies or critiques” that would give rise to “a newly emergent field of inquiry” stems partly from the contemporary shift in the way people of Asian descent are represented in America²: Asian America has been “increasingly informed by the presence of ‘Asia’ in U.S. culture.”³ Yet, the structure of disciplines, which maintains divisions such as inside/outside and familiar/strange in search of the discipline’s object, has not offered ways of understanding the changed reality.⁴

If we extend the concern expressed in Orientations to the field of visual culture, then we can see that insufficient attention has been given to the epistemological and aesthetic contours of Asian Americans’ relationship to images linked to ethnic identities: that is, few studies have examined the phenomenological misrecognition of Asian Americans in North America.⁵ The reason for this is partly that viewers’ relation to what they believe they see is often understood through the logic of the mirror stage. One consequence of this understanding is that viewers distinguish themselves from seen objects over there. Yet, as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks points out, the mirror stage is “a projection of a real image but not as yet a reintrojection of the image, which will necessarily have to be ‘libidinalized and narcissised’ in an exchange with the image of the other, as the bodily ego.”⁶ This line of thinking asks us to consider not only what we see on the big screen, but also what we do not or cannot see, as well as the position that a person occupies in order to view the image in the first place. In other words, the relationship between viewer and image obscured by visual epistemic regimes is a challenge central to studying representations of Asian Americans.⁷

But at the same time, the trajectory of the subject separate from an object world—that is, a particular viewing position that observes the differences between categories (e.g., Japanese American and Vietnamese American)—has been constantly rewritten in aesthetic practices. Playing with this trajectory, diasporic artists have created different ways of seeing and imagining the world, troubling epistemological divides.⁸ Yet one political dilemma of such (re)configuration is its possible overlap with a situation that “rearranges desires” facilitated by contemporary globalization.⁹ This dilemma may reflect the growing precarity in today’s world, or emergent possibilities and challenges in the study of aesthetic practices.¹⁰ With this complexity in mind, I focus in this article on Asian Americans’ relationship to images expressing ethnic identities by analyzing two films, Helen Lee’s My Niagara (1992) and Prey (1995), that exemplify young Asian Americans’ and Canadians’ reinvention of their sense of self in the process of encountering other diasporas and figures who appear at the limits of their knowledge.¹¹ Both of these films portray the contradictory experiences that female protagonists undergo in their everyday lives due to their ethnicities.

My Niagara was co-written with Toronto-born novelist Kerri Sakamoto and filmed while Lee was working at Women Make Movies, an independent media arts organization in New York City. In the film, 20-year-old Julie Kumagai, a third-generation Japanese Canadian, is absorbed in figuring out “who” she is: often she cannot make sense of her ethnic identity. Mirroring the obscurity of Julie...