ABSTRACT
The concept of the postracial exists in great tension with Asian American film and video’s history of collectivity, where racial solidarity has been formed through material, institutional, discursive, and aesthetic connections. Postraciality more generally came into vogue during Barack Obama’s first term in office, when celebrations for the first Black U.S. president masked what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2010) has critiqued as evidence, instead, of an insidiously “colorblind racism.” Although many reject postraciality due to the inaccurate implication that racial inequality has ended, there is a case to be made for a productive postraciality. Such a postraciality would not necessarily align with the familiar group identity politics that have formed the basis for Ethnic Studies, but with what I call an Asian American identity aesthetics. Although identity politics and, by implication, group identity have been the cornerstone of Asian American studies as established by scholars David Palumbo-Liu, Lisa Lowe, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, and others, the notion of postraciality, whether real or imagined, problematizes the politics of racial collectivity. In this chapter, I posit the term “identity aesthetics” as an alternative to “identity politics” for describing the existence of critical, abstract or oblique references to racial identity that are beyond the usual (literal and political) investments in race by texts and authors, particularly as the former term refers to groups or collectivity. 1
