Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Film and Television

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. For Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema's radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.

This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history--how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America.

In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking. Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions.

Moving the Image is the first volume to document the remarkable body of film, video and radio produced by Asian and Pacific Americans from the 1960s to the 1990s. Fifty award-winning filmmakers, media artists, and writers speak firsthand to issues of generation an gender, ethnicity and nationality, which shape their imagery and identities.

The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media.

In Vulgar Beauty Mila Zuo offers a new theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by showing how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture stars produce feelings of Chineseness. To illustrate this, Zuo uses the vulgar as an analytic to trace how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and produced through affect. She frames the vulgar as a characteristic that is experienced through the Chinese concept of weidao, or flavor, in which bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour performances of beauty produce non-Western forms of sexualized and racialized femininity. Analyzing contemporary film and media ranging from actress Gong Li's post-Mao movies of the late 1980s and 1990s to Joan Chen's performance in Twin Peaks to Ali Wong's stand-up comedy specials, Zuo shows how vulgar beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 97-107). Text in English with German summary.

First book-length study of comic film director and media celebrity Taika Waititi. Author Matthew Bannister analyses Waititi's feature films and places his other works and performances--short films, TV series, advertisements, music videos, and media appearances--in the fabric of popular culture. The book's thesis is that Waititi's playful comic style draws on an ironic reading of NZ identity as Antipodean camp, a style which reflects NZ's historic status as colonial underdog.

Mira Nair has broken new ground as both a feminist filmmaker and an Indian filmmaker. Several of her works, especially those related to the South Asian diaspora, have been influential around the globe. Amardeep Singh delves into the complexities of Nair's films from 1981 to 2016, offering critical commentary on all of Nair's major works, including her early documentary projects as well as shorts.

Framer Framed brings together for the first time the scripts and detailed visuals of three of Trinh Minh-ha's provocative films: Reassemblage, Naked Spaces--Living is Round, and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.

Over the past two decades, independent director Gregg Araki has emerged as one of the most intriguing auteurs of contemporary U.S. cinema. A leading figure of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Araki is known for his innovative, eye-opening, and at-times-controversial films aimed primarily at queer audiences.

Ang Lee came to the fore in the 1990s as one of the 'second wave' of Taiwanese directors. Afterstudying at New York University, Lee directed three comedy-dramas - Pushing Hands, The WeddingBanquet, Eat Drink Man Woman. However, it was Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility which brought him both critical and commercial success. Then his triumphant return to the East with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon transformed him into an internationally renowned director.

This the first book to examine the films of the acclaimed and popular Indian-born and Harvard educated filmmaker, Mira Nair. A unique voice in cinema today, she is one of the few female directors who made it to the top of a male-dominated profession. Her films feature an incomparably sensuous visual style yet at the same time often record the injustice of the disenfranchised and the cross-pollination of East and West.

This book covers Anna May Wong's entire career through detailed filmographic entries, each containing critical commentary as well as standard cast and technical credits, synopses, and newspaper and magazine reviews. The separate sections detail Wong's stage work and radio and television appearances.

Anna May Wong was the best known Chinese American actress during Hollywood's golden age, a free spirit and embodiment of the flapper era much like Louise Brooks. She starred in over fifty movies between 1919 and 1960, sharing the screen with such luminaries as Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Marlene Dietrich. Born in Los Angeles in 1905, Wong was the second daughter of six children born to a laundryman and his wife. Obsessed with film at a young age, she managed to secure a small part in a 1919 drama about the Boxer Rebellion. Her most famous film roles were in The Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco, and Shanghai Express opposite Dietrich. Despite these successes, instances of overt racism plagued Wong's career.

Shirley Jennifer Lim re-evaluates Wong's life and work as a consummate artist by mining an historical archive of her efforts outside of Hollywood cinema. From her pan-European films and her self-made My China Film to her encounters with artists such as Josephine Baker, Carl Van Vechten, and Walter Benjamin, Lim scrutinizes Wong's cultural production and self-fashioning.

Forty-five years after Bruce Lee's sudden death at age thirty-two, journalist and bestselling author Matthew Polly has written the definitive account of Lee's life. It's also one of the only accounts; incredibly, there has never been an authoritative biography of Lee. Following a decade of research that included conducting more than one hundred interviews with Lee's family, friends, business associates, and even the actress in whose bed Lee died, Polly has constructed a complex, humane portrait of the icon.

The first book-length study of Korean identities in American cinema and television, "Hollywood Asian" investigates the career of Ahn (1905-1978), a pioneering Asian American screen icon and son of celebrated Korean nationalist An Ch'ang-ho. In this groundbreaking scholarly study, Hye Seung Chung examines Ahn's career to suggest new theoretical paradigms for addressing cross-ethnic performance and Asian American spectatorship.

Comedian. Icon. TV star. Hollywood casualty. Role model. Trash talker. Fag hag. Gypsy. Tramp. Thief. Margaret Cho is the only living human being to be all these things without having multiple personality disorder and she displays them all in this funny, fierce, and honest memoir.

In this work, Mindy Kaling shares her observations, fears, and opinions about a wide-ranging list of the topics she thinks about the most - from her favourite types of guys to life in the Office writers' room to her leisure pursuit of dieting and how much she loves romantic comedies.

A poignant book by Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh off the Boat star Constance Wu about family, romance, sex, shame, trauma, and how she found her voice on the stage. Her stories offer a behind-the-scenes look at being Asian American in the entertainment industry and the continuing evolution of her identity and influence in the public eye.

Anna May Wong used her stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film. Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa's stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor's remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes.