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

It is easy to be excited by Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship. For junior scholars coming of age around social media and for established scholars who have witnessed the scope of this cultural shift, Lori Kido Lopez’s book delivers a refreshing, insightful, and necessary investigation into the evolving state of Asian American activism and cultural belonging in our contemporary media landscape. Lopez shows how media activism enables Asian Americans—who have been historically stereotyped, marginalized, and excluded in mainstream media—to access “greater participation and a recognized voice in media” (23). With media representations being so central in constructing a national cultural imaginary, Lopez argues that the fight for representation in the media is invariably a fight over Asian American citizenship. The manuscript traverses multiple media sites—from more traditional activist organizations and advertising agencies to new media outlets such as YouTube, Twitter, and online fan forums—to offer a comprehensive multidisciplinary study on the representational, cultural, and institutional formations surrounding Asian American media activism and citizenship.

Essential to Asian American Media Activism is the concept of “cultural citizenship.” Citizenship in America has revolved around an individual’s legal status, granting or prohibiting the right to participate in the nation-state. Lopez contends, however, that an individual’s legal status cannot fully encompass the lived experience of citizenship. She proposes “cultural citizenship” as a framework to account for the ways that cultural practices and cultural institutions produce citizenship by facilitating shared experiences, promoting emotional connections, and building community. Cultural citizenship thus expands our definition of citizenship, and at the same time it “stands in opposition to normative assumptions about the necessity of assimilation” because it includes cultural practices and minority identities outside of the mainstream (12). With minority communities continuing to be disenfranchised by the mainstream media industry, cultural citizenship provides an analytic that navigates the complex ways in which minority groups affirm their own cultural belonging while redressing the institutions that regulate them.

Media activism plays an important role in authorizing cultural citizenship. Media activism fundamentally asserts Asian America’s collective effort to stake claim over its own community in a “neoliberal media culture” that exalts individual citizenship “as something that everyone must attain for herself” (13). While Asian American activists hold individualized goals, Lopez sees their variegated yet rich interpretations of Asian American cultural citizenship as exemplary of their collective action and power. Her study migrates across media platforms to reveal the diversity, influence, and efficacy of twenty-first-century media activism. Based on her extensive experiences working with the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), the book combines sociological ethnography with cultural critique to generate a compelling piece of research that blends academic criticism with community activism. Her turn to purportedly “devalued forms of popular culture”—like online fan forums, Twitter, and YouTube—challenges our preconceived desire for 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” in order to “expand the category of media activist to participants who might not normally be considered” (23).

Asian American Media Activism investigates activism at five different institutional arenas across the contemporary media industry, moving from more traditional spaces to online social platforms. Chapters 1 and 2 examine media activism at organizations that advocate for Asian American representation in film and television. Chapter 1 details how local independent activist groups based in the Los Angeles area, particularly MANAA, organize against larger media corporations when addressing misrepresentations of Asian Americans in the media. Chapter 2 focuses on policy-oriented institutions to demonstrate how battles over regulatory policies “fall within the realm of culture” (73) because “policy interventions” implicitly affect the ways that “representations are shaped, shows are created, ratings are measured, and channels are expanded” (107). Although Lopez appreciates the work of local advocacy groups, she...