Toward a Third Wave: Why Media Matters in Asian American Studies

This is a manifesto, a call for advancing a third wave of collaboration among artists, scholars, and community to make media matter once again in Asian American studies. I am not referring to simply screening films in the classroom or researching web content, but rather a deeper engagement in the production of knowledge, the creation of culture, and, ultimately, the advancement of social justice. It is a call to marshal all of our resources, whether intellectual, creative, or the power of social action. Interactive, online technologies unleash new possibilities, such as “footnoting” a film online, heightening the experiential power of visual knowledge through gaming, and delivering content on digital platforms that expand the reach of Asian American studies.

Back to the future of the origins of Asian American independent media production: In its first wave during the 1970s, filmmaking functioned as a cultural organ of the Asian American movement. Tasked with constructing the narrative of political identity and influenced by eclectic, cultural shape shifters from Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s theory of third cinema, to Mao’s art for the people, Ozu, and American alternative film, the work resisted racist images while building new forms and representations. One of the earliest of the genre is Robert Nakamura’s classic documentary Manzanar (1972), in which he both reclaimed the buried history of Japanese American concentration camps and imagined a new aesthetics. A few years later, Curtis Choy’s tour de force Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue (1975) was a rapper’s delight meets rage against the culture machine that detonated any notion of flaccid assimilation.

Filmmakers worked alongside scholars, students, and activists in the production of individual work and the establishment of institutions like New York’s Asian Cine-Vision, the Boston Asian American Resource Workshop, Seattle’s King Street Media, Los Angeles’s Visual Communications, and the Center for Asian American Media (formerly the National Asian American Telecommunications Association), based in San Francisco but established as the only national Asian American media arts center. We saw ourselves as interrelated moving parts of a larger Asian American movement, mobilizing collectively against U.S. aggression in Asia and for ethnic studies, labor rights, gender rights, equality in health care housing, and education. I worked in the early 1980s as the director of Asian Cine-Vision in New York’s Chinatown. We were a few doors down East Broadway from the Chinatown History Museum that historian Jack Tchen was launching, and nearby were the Basement Workshop art and literature collective, the Chinese Progressive Association, the Chinatown Health Clinic, and any number of community-focused organizations. We mounted film programs at the Chatham Square Library moderated by Asian American academics. Sometimes recent immigrants from China complained about the postscreening discussions. It reminded them of reeducation sessions during the Cultural Revolution. We were very, very young.

The Japanese American movement for redress and reparations during that time epitomizes the collaborative spirit, with former internees, lawyers, academics, community and movement activists, and politicians all playing interconnected roles. Films such as Steven Okazaki’s Unfinished Business and Loni Ding’s Nisei Soldier gave the history an essential human dimension. Crews from Asian American media arts centers filmed testimony and interviews with former internees that could be used to encourage others to come forward and participate in hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). With no Internet streaming, we “bicycled” tapes through the U.S. postal service. John Esaki at Visual Communications in Los Angeles would mail tapes to New York. We would then haul a television set and a gargantuan early VCR to a church basement or someone’s living room, and show the tapes at emotionally charged and transformational, internee workshops to prepare for the CWRIC hearings. The findings of the Commission, Personal Justice Denied, set the foundation for the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The second wave of Asian American independent media, beginning in the 1980s, was distinguished by the sweeping demographic change of new immigration in Asian American communities, and increasing professionalization and specialization...