Mixed Race Matters: What Emma Stone and Bruno Mars Can Tell Us about the Future of Asian American Media

Mixed-race Asian Americans are the most logical place to start thinking about the future of Asians in the United States while also being the least likely starting point for a conversation about Asian Americans in the media, especially visual media. Of all newlyweds in 2010, Asian Americans had the highest rate of outmarriage (28 percent).¹ Presuming that some of these marriages will also produce children, it seems obvious that mixed-race Asian Americans should be a significant presence in Asian American representations. However, Asians claim a disproportionately small share of conventional visual media in the United States, and mixed-race Asian Americans' portion of that share is smaller still. To locate the future of Asian American media studies in a nearly invisible population may seem eccentric at the very least, but it is this very eccentricity—a term that comes from the ancient Greek roots of ek, "out of," and kentron, "center"—that makes them so crucial to any discussion of race and representation. From their location at the margin of the margins, they force us to confront fundamental questions: How do you effectively respond to underrepresentation? What are the possibilities for representation in an increasingly commodified visual field? And what do we mean by "race" when we talk about racial representation? Even as mixed-race Asian American representations amplify the problematic of all Asian American representation, I also want to argue for the particular value of mixed race representations as they diverge from that of other Asian American images.

The contradiction between the statistical and demographic facts of Asian America and the visual representation of the same cannot simply be resolved by producing more and more images of mixed-race Asians. In fact, there are several high-profile mixed-race Asians who have driven the cultural zeitgeist now and in the past. I've written before about celebrities like Keanu Reeves and Tiger Woods and the ways in which they are rarely read as mixed race, but there are earlier examples as well. Suzie Wong, the archetypical Asian female for most twentieth-century Americans, was played by mixed-race star Nancy Kwon, and porcelain-skinned beauty Merle Oberon, who played that most British of heroines, Cathy from Wuthering Heights, was also mixed-race Asian. As was true in the past, the multiplication of images of mixed-race Asians will have little effect if they are merely enfolded in already-existing racial narratives that slot bodies into discrete categories.

These examples, of course, are not created equal. The social and historical circumstances that push one racial reading or another, that "allow" one to pass as white or "force" one to be read as Asian or black are distinct and meaningful, but what each example does share is the perceived malleability of Asianness. The commodification of images of mixed-race Asians depends on this very belief. The face of what the New York Times called "generation ethnically ambiguous" might very well be "Ariane," a phenomenally popular, mixed-race Asian, stock-photo model.² Her face sells everything from cameras to cereal to Zumba classes by representing everywoman or, more specifically, "everyrace." As other scholars have argued, mixed-race beauty has become a common currency of both commercial marketing and institutions like universities hoping to visually display their multicultural credentials.³ These images of racially ambiguous people serve as floating signifiers for amorphous nonwhite bodies, allowing us to inscribe a variety of racial meanings onto those bodies.

If proliferating images cannot remediate the problems of visibility, then a second response might be to call for more accurate and authentic representations. The recent controversy over Cameron Crowe's casting decisions in the film Aloha (2015) exemplifies the pitfalls of this second solution. The film starred Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a character who was written to be one-quarter Hawaiian and one-quarter Chinese. The backlash against casting Stone in the role grew large enough to move Crowe from his early defense of his casting choices to a half-hearted apology in June, followed by a...