Introduction

The opportunity to assemble an In Focus section dedicated to Asian American film and media, a first for Cinema Journal, is a special moment, bringing a field at least a quarter century in the making into the mainstream of cinema and media studies. But if Asian American media history has taught us anything, it's that crossing over should always give us pause. The Oliver Stone–produced The Joy Luck Club's (Wayne Wang, 1993) cross-generational story of four Chinese American families earned critical acclaim, being placed on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's list of top ten films of 1993. All-American Girl (ABC, 1994–1995) debuted in 1994 as the first prime-time sitcom with an all Asian American cast and marked Margaret Cho's entrée into the living rooms of mainstream America. Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, 2002) rocked the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, legendary for its conflict-ridden question-and-answer session that spurred Ebert to come to defend the movie against hostile audience members, and became the first movie acquired by MTV Films.

Despite this collective excitement, these well-heralded instances of rare prime-time and commercial exposure have all proved less pivotal than audiences, commentators, and studios once imagined, relegated to discussions of missed opportunities or representational politics in the Asian American community. Repeatedly in the mainstream, Asian American communities have seen hopes dashed and voices marginalized in a racial landscape that is predominantly white and occasionally black. The 2016 Oscars telecast showed how a referendum on race in Hollywood still managed to relegate Asian Americans as a subject to stereotypical jokes by Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen. The ongoing casting controversy over "whitewashing"—by which Asian characters are replaced with white or "colorblind" versions—in Hollywood films like Doctor Strange (Scott Derrickson, 2016) and Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017) shows the lengths to which the mainstream is willing to go to erase Asians from the visual landscape of its original source material. Even more "positive" examples, like the ascendancy of directors like Justin Lin, whom Variety dubbed the "Billion Dollar Filmmaker," and Cary Fukunaga, have not generated meaningful conversations about race, authorship, and labor beyond merely proving that Asian Americans, too, can successfully helm white franchises like Star Trek and True Detective.¹ Despite the many inroads by Asian American content creators in mainstream film and media, their potential remains unrealized as an add-on or part of a cursory conversation on the periphery.

Moreover, Asian Americans are merely the third token that follows African Americans and Latinos in the United States, an afterthought among afterthoughts. We are not suggesting that we supplant African Americans and Latinos in the conversation on race, cinema, and the larger media. Rather, we aim to give cinema and media studies a reason to center Asian America beyond the mere occasion, like Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, and beyond the customary turn taking of such occasions. We center Asian American media studies as a way to consider the potential of cinema and media studies to deepen our understanding of the relationality of race, where visual identification is central to representation and vice versa. And we argue that considering Asian American media studies can deepen cinema and media studies' attention to race as a whole and not as a tokenizing project of the discipline that also seeks to discipline its emancipatory potential.

Despite the challenges within the mainstream, Asian Americans have more recently become everyday faces in American television and on-demand media. South Asian actors and actresses, such as Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Priyanka Chopra, and Danny Pudi, appear in their own television shows while leveraging their fame to help green-light other shows. Ali Wong's Baby Cobra (Jay Karas, 2016) is one of Netflix's most celebrated and high-profile new comedy specials, garnering Wong interviews with NPR's Fresh Air and coverage in the New York Times. Ken Jeong's name is on the executive producer's chair, the lead actor's trailer door, and in the title of an ABC television show. The presence of Asian faces...