Challenging Representations by Celebrating Difference

In her Words. YouTube.com. 2011. Web.

The predominant stereotypes of Asian identity in Hollywood have been framed by Caucasian cultural producers. Typifying this approach is a fundamentally Marxist ideology whereby the boundaries of identity, be it positive or negative, provide justification for social control and normative models of thought and power.

Identities, Woodward observed, are “forged through the marking of difference” (1997, 29). These are often forged on the basis of binary difference, like, for example, Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction, or “white”/“not-white”, “civilized”/“barbaric” and “us”/”them”, where the former takes precedence over the latter. The representation of Asian identity in accordance with this binary marking of difference is complicit to the policing of oversimplified differences between white and non-white, and in the segregation and degradation of those who are different (Shah, 2003, 2).

Resistance to this model of representation have generally come from outside of Hollywood by Asian directors.  Their primary concern was neither political nor necessarily framed in terms of building as sense of Asian community. Directors like Wayne Wang wanted to give a sensitive and realistic depiction of Asian-American life incorporating symbols and markers of a range of Asian communities.  The power of doing so is not from merely seeking to subvert the binary opposition of power, but deny it utterly by a celebration of difference. 

The power of representation in building intercultural difference is clear. A movement towards this approach in Hollywood would liberate identity from the binary logic that has defined cross-cultural relationships since the dawn of time.

References

Woodward, K. 1997. “Concepts of identity and difference”. In Woodward, K (ed.). Identity and Difference pp. 7 – 50. London: Sage.

Shah, H. “’Asian Culture’ and Asian American Identities in the Television and Film Industries of the United States”. Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education 3.3, August 2003: 1 – 10.