Oriental Style and Asian Chic: The Politics of Racial Visibility in Film and Fashion

“If I like their race, how can that be racist?” goes the punch line, referring to Asians, in a famous 1990s sitcom. The humor derives from the unexpected delinking of racial difference and racial discrimination when it comes to Asians. The sentiment that Asians are desirable (in certain instances) is a product of the model minority myth, disseminated in the 1960s in an attempt to delegitimize the Civil Rights Movement. William Petersen’s “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” was featured in the New York Times in 1966. In the same year, U.S. News and World Report published an article on Chinese Americans, entitled “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S.” In both instances, “Asian” values of studiousness, thrift, and a law-abiding nature are compared directly to the “delinquency” of “problem minorities,” namely African Americans.

Vijay Prashad presents the repercussions of this model minority stereotype for Asian Americans as a reformulation of W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous opening to The Souls of Black Folk (1903). At the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois asked African Americans, “How does it feel to be a problem?” Prashad asks, at the turn of the twenty-first century, “How does it feel to be a solution?” Both Jane Chi Hyun Park and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu pick up this question of the increased visibility and incorporation of Asian Americans and Asian cultural markers into different aspects of contemporary mainstream U.S. culture. Park ponders the reasons for the frequency of Asian characters, symbols, and motifs in mainstream Hollywood films. Her most engaging readings take on the inter-racial complexities of the model minority myth, whether Asians are depicted as industrious workers, wise sages, or kung fu experts. Tu, from a different perspective, turns to the supposed model minorities themselves, successful and up-and-coming Asian American fashion designers. She traces how these designers represent their own career trajectories within the persistence of this myth, as well as how they negotiate their racial identities at different stages of the design process, from conceptualization to production.

Despite their methodological differences, both Park and Tu provide critical analyses of the symbolic and material construction of Asian American racial difference without falling into the three traps that Park identifies as challenges to a critique of racial forms: “denouncing them as simple stereotypes unworthy of scholarly attention, automatically citing them as evidence of the increasing presence (and implied power) of Asians and Asian Americans […], or reclaiming them as subversive tactics that Asian American artists, critics, and audiences can use to resist [hegemonic cultural systems]” (viii–ix). From Hollywood block-busters to design collections advertised in Vogue and Elle, both books carefully explore popular representations of Asia as both a racial and aesthetic category in order to uncover the cultural significance of such forms.

Historically, both works are informed by a late-capitalist contextualization of race. As an umbrella term created to consolidate political power and heighten visibility, “Asian American” has accounted for a vast array of peoples and cultures tied together by accidental geography disguised as racial coherence. The 1965 Immigration Act, responsible for ending quotas that had severely restricted migrations from Asia throughout the century, further added to the heterogeneity of this category. A selective immigration process resulted in a new wave of Asian immigrants delineated by class and education, including an educated managerial class, petit bourgeois merchants, and refugees that were a direct result of U.S. imperialist endeavors throughout the Pacific Rim. Domestically, the late twentieth century is also characterized by multiculturalist agendas, both on the part of the state (that celebrates diversity in lieu of emphasizing racial inequalities) as well as capitalism (that commodifies everything, including racial difference). Internationally, Asia enters the global economy, including Japan, the “tiger economies,” China, and India. Within the context of such transnational...