Page 2 “In considering our childhood rapport for Data, we are confronted with the complexity of our affections, a complexity that comes to bear upon our intellectual preoccupations…”
“the complexity of our affections” feels like such a ripe phrase to me. The authors are pushing up against attempts to define positive representations of Asian Americans in pop culture. What does positive representation look like when there are so many different people who might identify as Asian American.
Page 14 “But even as the unprecedented corporate interest in Asian communities increased the circulation of Asian American cultural productions within and beyond Asian American audiences, participation in this new multicultural marketplace came with some new demands. The most pressing of these was the demand to produce palatable and thus saleable visions of Asianness…”
Just as APIA representation in pop cultural media is complicated, attention on APIA people from the pop market is complicated. Corporations recognizing the importance of a variety of people in the “fragmenting market” could be viewed as a positive thing but it also enforces an “otherness” both by treating Asian and Pacific Islander Americans as fundamentally different from White Americans and by creating a version of Asianness that could be marketed to White Americans. (also treating Asian Americans as one homogeneous group)
Page 17 “…there is little consensus about what it means to be well represented. as such, one might suspect that this language of authenticity can do scant more than simply sanction certain identities and deny the ‘heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity,’ …” and, indeed, the decades-long desire to generate “positive images” or more “authentic representations” has done little to undermine the power of stereotypes or ultimately to free Asian Americans from them.”
perhaps what is being sought then is not positive images necessarily but images with dimension to them. Perhaps using authenticity not to describe an essential quality of Asian Americans, but the authentic experience of individual people.
“… If we accept a priori that Asian American Studies is subjectless, then rather than looking to complete the category “Asian American,” to actualize it by such methods as enumerating various components of differences … we are positioned to critique the effects of the various configurations of power and knowledge through which the term comes to have meaning.”
This is a quote from scholar Kandice Chuh on the subject of subject-less discourse. This idea has been bouncing around my brain since reading it. As Chico pointed out in class this is hardly a complete definition of Asian American because of its post structural peculiarity, but it does seem to me to capture a certain truth about what it means to discuss politically sanctioned groups of people.