ABSTRACT
What happened to Asian American cinema? It’s a reasonable question, considering the momentum built by the first wave of scholarship on Asian American cinema in publications such as Moving the Image (1991) and Peter X Feng’s Identities in Motion (2002). These books discussed Asian American cinema in the present tense and theorized identity formation, minority filmmaking practices, and gender and sexuality in the narrative, experimental, and documentary films made by Asian Americans in the 1980s and 1990s. More than just documenting and acknowledging the existence of contemporaneous Asian American films and videos, this scholarship was often in dialogue with filmmakers themselves in collectively theorizing Asian American identity, representation, and history. But if one looks to current academic literature for signs of new Asian American independent filmmaking, one would wonder whether Asian American cinema still exists at all. With the exception of a surge of interest in Justin Lin’s 2002 feature Better Luck Tomorrow and the chapters written for this collection, there has been very little academic writing on films directed by Asian Americans since 2000. 1
