The University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity held a virtual panel titled “Thinking Beyond Stereotypes in Asian American Media” Tuesday afternoon in which four Asian American authors discussed stereotypes of Asian Americans in the media.
Panel moderator Melissa Phruksachart briefly introduced the authors before they each took time to explain their work. Lori Lopez, professor of communication arts and director of Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discussed her book “Micro Media Industries,” which describes how minority groups have managed to maintain a presence in the media through micro media outlets.
“All Asian American media communities struggle with size and scale because Asian Americans are a minority within the U.S.,” Lopez said. “In trying to legitimize and better understand these long micro media industries, I’m definitely trying to give us tools for understanding Asian American media industries on a broader scale.”
Phruksachart began the Q&A portion of the panel by asking the authors to address how the exclusion and erasure of Asian Americans in the media can be used as a starting point for understanding how to improve these media representations.
“I actually think each of your books similarly challenges this conception of lack,” Phruksachart said. “So can you each speak to ideas like absence, reference, the minor or the micro as critical openings, rather than as assumed foreclosures in your respective books?”
Denise Khor, associate professor of Asian American studies and visual studies at Northeastern University, said her book titled “Transpacific Convergences,” describes what is lost from the typical representation of Asian Americans in film as well as what is present and possible to display.
“My book really tries to think through multiple layers of loss,” Khor said. “We think about loss in terms of the absence of certain films from the film canon, absence from what gets preserved. But for me, this question of loss also comes through in thinking about what happens to the cinema that I recover in my book — where does it go?”
The Q&A was then opened up for the audience to ask the panelists questions. In response to a student’s question about how people can change how historical stereotypes contribute to Asian American representation in media, Zuo said she believes actors can play a large role in this process.
“I guess I always want to suggest that there are ways in which the actors themselves are more essential than we perhaps might give them credit for and that there are moments where they are also engineering some kind of subversion within the dominant text,” Zuo said.
Phruksachart ended the conversation by asking Huang how she believes academic writers can effectively communicate these methods of combating stereotypes to the general public, especially if they are not deeply politically engaged. In response, Huang said that she had not yet figured out how to convey these sentiments to public audiences.
I feel like there’s still a lot more thinking that I would like to do about what it means to translate academic works for public audiences outside of just the standard — turn it into (something) like a news article that’s written in more legible language,” Huang said. “I tried to write my books in legible language, but I think that’s a puzzle that I haven’t quite cracked yet.”
Summer News Editor Sneha Dhandapani can be reached at sdhanda@umich.edu.