Project Proposal

In this paper, I want to explore the politics of visuality and to articulate my project around the issue of technology and its uses in marginalizing Asian American voices in the mainstream. I especially focus on the social implications that might have led to Black Panther Richard Aoki and several other Asian Americans’ complete removal from the mainstream thought. I led an event a few days back involving the screening of the Aoki Documentary (2009). The film elicited several responses from audience members and sparked discussions of Asian American visibility, representation and race/racism. The emerging story of Richard Aoki amalgamated the political, social and cultural problems that have haunted Asian Americans historically. In the case of Aoki, the documentary explored all circumstances and moments in which Aoki was either cut off in the frame or was blurred, mired in the background of muddled colors

For this project, I will draw from theoretical analyses such as Keeling’s The Witches’ Flight, Rhodes’ Becoming Media Subjects, Dyer’s work on whiteness and Cheng’s Melancholia of Race. From these perspectives of cultural studies as well as literary and sociological studies, I want to engage several texts and films and exegetically read them at the level of visual storytelling and narration. Because I want to take issue with the visuality of technology as race in films/movie/among other cultural products, I will not pursue a more conventional critical film studies.

Of course, my project will not only extend to just Richard Aoki. For my project, I will read the visual frames and narrative of the Aoki Documentary as well as Rea Tajiri’s documentary on Yuri Kochiyama. The questions I will ask will involve the differences in cinematography, angles, lightings, and framing and the juxtaposition of Asian American images to those of Black and Latino figures. How have figures like Richard Aoki and Yuri Kochiyama disappeared from historical recollection? Why have their names been forgotten? Why have their efforts paled in comparison to those of Caesar Chavez, Angela Davis, Che Guevara, among others? How has the camera’s gaze constructed an image of privlegedness to non-Asian Americans and cast radical Asian Americans out of this spotlight? Has the media also come to shape our own perceptions of Asian Americans? Has this gaze of privilegedness come to determine Asian Americans’ contemporary position of marginalization in the mainstream? Or is it because Asian Americans as model minorities have locked ourselves up in silence?