Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (review)

One of the most dynamic developments in Asian American Studies over the past decade has been its growing regard for popular culture. This is not to suggest that the field has historically ignored popular culture: along with articles on racism in mass media and mainstream culture in 1970s’ community-based movement and scholarly publications, Eugene Franklin Wong’s On Visual Media Racism (1978) examined the roles of Asian Americans on and behind the silver screen during Hollywood’s early and classical eras, and Elaine Kim’s Asian American Literature (1982) situated works by Asian American writers in relation to high literary and popular-cultural discourses of race.¹ However, such early studies set up the terms by which popular culture would be largely examined by Asian Americanists well into the 1990s, and still partly today: 1) disproportionate attention to dominant commercial media while neglecting popular media produced by Asian Americans; 2) regard for the ‘popular,’ in contrast to more properly literary or artistic works, as lesser, secondary objects significant primarily for their reproduction of racism; and 3) analytical treatment of the popular, following the methodological habit of literary studies, as texts with little or no reference to their mass reception and interpretation.

Recent scholarship, however, has productively shifted the field’s understanding of popular culture in two ways. First, it has opened what counts as popular culture beyond such familiar objects of commercialized entertainment as films, television, and popular music and literature, to encompass ordinary cultural objects and practices, their consumption and use, and the everyday relations in which they are embedded. Second, incorporating the methodological advances of cultural studies, the recent scholarship has expanded its critical frame beyond text-centered analysis to simultaneously engage texts, audiences, and institutions, and the technologies that mediate their interrelations.

These shifts are well-represented in the recently published anthology, Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, edited by Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. Comprised of twelve chapters and a wide-ranging introduction, the book offers an excellent survey, although not without some unevenness reflective of the growing pains of this field or subfield. Some pieces are very strong and compelling, others less so—even disappointing in a few cases, where promising research is shortchanged by a methodological or theoretical ‘poverty’ indicative of popular culture’s emergent status in Asian American Studies. This is to be expected and perhaps even unavoidable at this historical moment, given that Asian American popular culture studies is still characterized by individual projects pursued mostly autonomously from one another, supported by intermittent rather than continuous, sustained dialogues by its participants, as exemplified by the landmark anthology, Black Popular Culture.² Instead, Alien Encounters is a showcase of widely varying research, anchored by brilliant contributions by such leading practitioners as Sunaina Maira, Mimi Nguyen, and Wendy Chun.

Yet key developments in the field also provide coherence to the collection. Most notably, one finds feminist analysis more extensively integrated than in other aspects of Asian American Studies. This is both welcome and necessary, if unsurprising, in a book that valorizes objects and discourses historically denigrated as overly feminine (food and cooking, Indo-chic self-fashioning), crudely masculine (import car cultures, pulp fiction, hip hop), or otherwise vulgar or inauthentic (ethnic variety show videos, drag king performance). Methodologically, nearly every chapter also appreciably deepens or expands either Asian America’s ‘archive’ or ‘field sites,’ illuminating an impressive range of unstudied or understudied youth cultures, musics, art, media, performance, and everyday practices and discourses.

Two stand-outs that bring these elements together are Nhi T. Lieu’s study of diasporic niche media and Sunaina Maira’s critique of orientalist practices such as henna. Both authors craft ethnographically thick descriptions of their objects and carefully situate them in contexts simultaneously local, transnational, and historical. As Lieu concisely notes, the Paris by Night videos voraciously consumed by refugee and post-refugee generation Vietnamese...