Journal of Asian American Studies

In the introduction to his 2002 edited collection, Screening Asian Americans, Peter X. Feng describes Asian American film studies' incipient stage in which "every essay on Asian American cinema is forced to define its parameters, to constitute the field of inquiry afresh" (7). That Feng's own scholarship goes a long way toward establishing significant points of reference in a fast-developing field is evident in his 2002 monograph, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. This text is sure to be "required reading," not only for Asian American film studies, but for Asian American Studies more generally. Unlike such texts as Gina Marchetti's Romance and the "Yellow Peril" (1993) and Eugene Franklin Wong's On Visual Media Racism (1978), which concentrate their analyses on the Orientalist portrayals in mainstream American films, Feng's Identities in Motion focuses on those films and videos with Asian Americans behind the camera. A few edited collections have provided a meeting place for this conversation, including Russell Leong's Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts (1991), Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu's Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (2000), and, of course, Feng's own edited collection Screening Asian Americans, but Identities in Motion is more akin to Jun Xing's Asian America Through the Lens (1998) as a monograph offering a sustained analysis of the politics of representing identity and history. The unique and important contribution of Feng's text is its theory of racialized representations, based in the specifics of film and video, yet with larger repercussions for how we conceive of identity, stereotypes, and political resistance. [End Page 102]

Eschewing what Darrell Y. Hamamoto, in his introduction to Countervisions, calls "the excesses of psychoanalytic abstractions and theoreticism" (3), Feng offers with remarkable clarity a sophisticated theory of representation and identity formation, grounded in close readings of the visual texts, detailed production histories, and historical and political frameworks, that should resonate with the various audiences of Asian American Studies, film studies, and even scholars of autobiography and historical reference. Identities in Motion has as its central concern the ambivalence that necessarily marks Asian American production as these film- and video-makers (or, as Feng abbreviates them, "makers") must contend with established cinematic discourses, steeped as they are in racist and Orientalist legacies, even while they may seek to dismantle those discourses. The stark polarization of much oppositional discourse is limited, Feng recognizes, since to emphasize either complete cooptation or resistance to Orientalist ideologies is to elide the complexities of Asian American makers whose own identities and relationships to film are constituted both within and against the field of Hollywood's circulation. (Indeed, he cites the famous passage from Maxine Hong Kingston in which the perplexed autobiographical narrator asks, "What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?") Given the implications of ideological interpellation, not to mention the representational limitations of a panethnic term, Feng asserts, "the term Asian American is a discursive construction that implies a series of identifications that are not so much primordial (with ties to a mythic past of continuity) as instrumental (that is, political: dependent on a particular construction of the historical past)—a past predicated on discontinuity" (17). Understanding identity and historical representations as "discontinuous" means recognizing that the assumed transparency, coherence, and authority of identity and history are effects of power relations; such constructions are never adequate to the complexity and heterogeneity of what they seek to represent, and yet they too easily maintain authority as they are repetitiously performed. Given Asian American makers' ambivalence towards cinema's ability to be representative, and given the referential power cinema is too readily afforded, Feng argues the importance of recognizing the discontinuity of such influential representations of identity and history. How then to intervene in those "continuous" histories and in a sense of coherence both imposed and desired, in order to evoke a more ambivalent conception of what it means to be Asian American?

Identities in Motion argues that Asian American film and video "remobilize" the conceptions of identity and history. They intervene (although not necessarily intentionally) in cinema's reproduction of stereotypic images and productively destabilize Asian American identity by generating ambivalence. This is not to say [End Page 103] that they necessarily present alternative, "positive" images to supplant cinematic stereotypes; rather, citation functions to situate Asian American identities in an unstable relation to cinema. As Feng states: "Identity emerges from the friction between cited cinematic texts and the Asian American movies that incorporate them, which is to say that identity is produced by the friction between movies that arrest identity (essentialism) and Asian American movies that construct identity" (4). Instead of explicitly articulated critiques or stark oppositional postures, Feng has an eye for the "ironic enactments" of Asian American visual production, the contradictions emerging from multiply layered texts, the "interplay between memory and history" and the resulting gaps: "Asian American identity is defined not by history, but by gaps in history: the absence of information bespeaks a historical trauma that defines Asian Americans. . . . the investigation of these gaps returns us continually to those moments of crisis, renewing the traumas and thereby renewing (mis)identity" (17). The result is not a "new" coherent Asian American identity to be embraced, but a productive destabilization and a conception of identity that is contingent and that engages—not fills—the gaps.

The text offers three main parts. Part I, "Myths of Origin," focuses on key historic moments in which American national formation is contested through negotiations with a "primitive" or "foreign" Other. The first and rather brief chapter, "The Camera as Microscope," looks to those Asian American movies critically redeploying the ethnographic gaze. Marlon Fuentes' Bontoc Eulogy (1995) and Fatimah Tobing Rony's On Cannibalism (1994) question narratives of origin by engaging the loss of familial forebears through the overdetermination by "cinematic forebears" and ethnographic discourse. Chapter Two, "Pioneering Romance," features Nancy Kelly and Kenji Yamamoto's Thousand Pieces of Gold (1991), based on Ruthanne Lum McCunn's book of the same title, and Kayo Hatta's Picture Bride (1995) as films depicting the limited terms under which early Asian immigrant women embraced America, circumscribed in their roles and yet central to the founding of community and nation. The romance narrative, Feng argues, captures this "paradox of agency": "It is this paradox between agency and inevitability, between choice and lack of options, that accounts for the romance narrative, a narrative built around a structure of displaced agency, of inevitability, and of consent" (59). Feng's concluding analysis of Steven Okazaki's Living on Tokyo Time (1987), (set in contemporary America) uses a "failed" romance to probe the vulnerabilities of Asian American communities and to link provocatively the Asian American romance genre's successful resolution to a sustainable diasporic community. A third and particularly rewarding chapter, "Articulating Silence: Sansei and Memories of the Camps," demonstrates how Japanese American [End Page 104] makers, whose lives were evacuated by the silences of the previous generation's internment, utilize the type of "layering" allowed by cinema's unique temporal structure. Feng's nuanced readings reveal such techniques as the contradictory layering of simultaneous sounds and images to effect contrast and temporal disjunctures, or the recontextualizing of Hollywood films. His savvy critical engagement with Bakhtinian "dialogism" allows him to connect the technical play of multiple voices to power dynamics; the result is a deconstruction of history and memory's opposition and a demonstrated refusal, especially through Rea Tajiri's History and Memory (1991), of the "logic of visibility" on which cinema so heavily depends.

Part II on travelogues may seem to indicate a shift from temporal to geographical distance, yet Feng builds on the temporal analyses of preceding chapters, here using the deconstruction of history and memory to interrogate conceptions of departure and return. The fourth chapter features movies narrating the "return" to China, post-Cultural Revolution; these travelogues attempt recovery of the past, desiring continuous narratives to link China and North America in a seamless temporal and spatial movement. Discontinuity comes to the fore, however, in the disjuncture created by insider/outsider status, manifested through the contradictory use of voice-overs, the use of multiple types of footage, and critical engagement with the profilmic. If the movies of Chapter Four attempt self-reflexivity but fall short of critiquing their own investments in an Orientalized China, Chapter Five turns to From Hollywood to Hanoi (1993) and the citation by Thi Thanh Nga/Tiana of Hollywood Orientalist stereotypes. Feng's analysis of the film excels in its use of Homi Bhabha's theories of mimicry and the stereotype to locate the ambivalence necessarily marking colonial discourse (134). Tiana, as the hybrid product of Hollywood's colonizing discourse, makes evident through her imperfect performance of fixed stereotypes the disavowal of the racialized Other at the heart of that discourse. While the possibilities of critique through mimicry are limited, Feng finds that this "splitting" of colonial discourse lays bare the colonial machinery and allows for the possibility of renarrating discontinuous relations to the past; identity is remobilized in this sense.

Chapter Five together with Chapter Six form the crux of the book's argument regarding ambivalence and discontinuity. As the first of the chapters in Part III, "Performing Transformation," Chapter Six on Wayne Wang's 1981 film Chan Is Missing illustrates beautifully the contingency of Asian American identity. As the film's characters search for the missing Chan Hung and increasingly question any knowledge they may have had as to who he is, their own identities are destabilized, "as if the increasing indeterminacy of Chan's identity undermines everyone [End Page 105] else's identity" (161). The sharp analysis Feng provides of this film builds on his critique of fixed identity to emphasize here a "process of becoming" and an Asian American voice that can only be recognized as such through political mobilization. The remaining chapters of Part III take the "articulation of liminality" in other important directions, including an analysis of international film markets as destabilized by transnational films and representations of queer sexualities; Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996) and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993) provide the basis for this critique. The final chapter presents a somewhat startling juxtaposition of Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimentally structured Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) with Wayne Wang's popular 1993 film version of Amy Tan's novel The Joy Luck Club (not a film that easily fits into Part III's emphasis on questioning limitations on Asian American identity). Feng, however, uses the contrast to interrogate the "burden of representation" on cinematic adaptations as manifested through narrative structure and the challenge of incorporating multiple voices.

The eight chapters of Identities in Motion offer thoroughly developed, nuanced readings, beautifully wrought in their ability to balance theoretical sophistication and a keen awareness of complex production histories and market forces. Although the Afterword's brief treatment of interracial adoption narratives only gestures toward the complexity of the issue, it is only an indication of the important work to be done in the development of this relatively new field very much "in motion." Feng's analysis tackles an extraordinary range of films and videos, linking them together in a provocative argument attuned to the contradictions of both oppression and political resistance. His ability to connect form and structure to political dynamics, his meticulous attention to detail, and his generous footnotes laying bare key controversies indeed set the bar for only the most rigorous research to follow.