Asian-Americans in the Current Media

In the last decade, there have been so many changes in terms of Asians and Asian-Americans working in network television and the commercial cinema; this is a move that has been both unprecedented and inevitable, as it signals the ways in which television production has been atomized, with the advent of cable and the multiplicity of channel options, and film production has been decentralized, with the continuing importance of independent film production outside the standard studio system. Because Asian-Americans had been adept at navigating through independent production, cable-access broadcast, and public television access, many of the Asian-Americans who have developed their media careers in the past decade have been able to take advantage of the new possibilities open to them, but whether or not this will result in long-term career continuity remains a very open question.

Author Bio

Daryl Chin, is Associate Editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art. He has contributed articles to M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Theory and Criticism (edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor; Duke University Press, 2001), Asia in New York City: A Cultural Travel Guide (Asia Society & Avalon Travel Press, 2001), Tokens: The NYC Asian American Experience on Stage (edited by Alvin Eng; Asian American Writers Workshop & Temple University Press, 2001), among other anthologies. In a series of four lectures held at AAARI entitled “Asian American Cinema Workshop: The Moving Images of the Asian-American”, he examined some of the issues relating to the representation of Asian identity in American media. Currently, he is completing a monograph on the video artist Shigeko Kubota.