Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship by Lori Kido Lopez (review)

With her first book, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Lori Kido Lopez offers a fresh multidisciplinary take for understanding this recurring scenario in the US culture industry: a major network and creative team behind a problematic media production are forced to reckon with the swiftly mobilized opposition of Asian American media activists armed with smartphones and 140 characters. Lopez argues that in such cases, "while the stated goals of media activists might seem immediate—to recast a role, to demand an apology from producers, to hire an Asian American consultant or director, to produce more images of Asian Americans—what goes unstated is the connection between these achievements and the ultimate goal of cultural citizenship for Asian Americans."¹ If the full enjoyment of legal citizenship is still burdened by the ongoing contradictions of race and capital, Lopez's attention to cultural politics is indebted to the innovations of earlier Asian American scholarship like Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts (1996) and Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (2004).² Lopez's intervention, then, is to take seriously the seeming immateriality of an Internet ad, an online video, a hashtag, or a tweet, contending that they do not exist in an information vacuum but must be considered part of the wildly disparate contests and expressions for Asian American belonging in the United States. While the salvo of digitized ephemera takes up more and more space in our hard drives, our cognitive faculties, and our social environments, Lopez does not see our outright submission to neoliberal technology. Positioned as a scholar and practitioner of media activism, she is able to glean the necessary potential to produce meaningful challenges against "a ubiquitous postracial media discourse that insists upon race as merely an individual quality."³

The sites Lopez brings together to compose her study are intriguing and unexpected. Diverging from the canonical scholarly genres of literature, theater, and film, she pursues different iterations of media activism as they play out in the underexplored realms of policy, advertising, and rapidly changing social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter—underexplored, she suggests, given the way such highly commercialized and visible institutions are rife with co-optation by capitalist logics and are easily "a target of criticism rather than a site for potential contributions to social justice."⁴ But in spite of the skepticism of viewing Asian America as a brand name, a target audience, or a consumer public, Lopez does not concede their productive tensions in the work of fashioning cultural citizenship. Transaction, translation, and, to quote one of her interviewees, "transcreation" are also important moments in which meanings of value and (non)equivalence can be ascertained. Lopez suggests that paying attention to these combined social, cultural, and economic exchanges can help us not only critique but also collectively participate in constructing political and representational strategies to transform the terms of the Asian American community from within and without.⁵

Beginning with the variegated responses to the flourish of recent Asian American sitcoms like The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012–2015, Hulu, 2015–present) and Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–present), Lopez suggests "that even when images of minority communities succeed in gaining visibility there can be disagreement about what political gains have really been achieved."⁶ She contends that these "disagreements" over Asian Americans in the media "push back against assumptions that our neoliberal media landscape is inexorably moving toward the individual" and instead interrogates "specific examples of media activism [where] we can more clearly see how activists and minority communities believe that empowerment will be achieved through cultural citizenship."⁷ In fighting for cultural citizenship, then, Lopez teases out the distinction of "activism" versus "media activism," being careful to "counter a romanticism for a kind of 'authentic' or 'real' activism that is limited in who it can stem from or what kinds of actions and alliances it can include."⁸ She defines activism as "[beginning] with the identification of...