Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism

The book Asians on Demand explores whether media representation can advance racial justice by examining a contemporary archive of video works from the Asian diaspora. It challenges the narrow and damaging perceptions of Asian identity in mainstream media and provides a critical and nuanced alternative to the easily digestible forms generated by online streaming culture and multicultural lip service.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 26 September 2023
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

While the past decade has witnessed a push for increased diversity in visual media, Asians on Demand grapples with the pressing question of whether representation is enough to advance racial justice. Surveying a contemporary, cutting-edge archive of video works from the Asian diaspora in North America, Europe, and East Asia, this book uncovers the ways that diasporic artists challenge the narrow and damaging conceptions of Asian identity pervading mainstream media. Through an engagement with grassroots activist documentaries, experimental video diaries by undocumented and migrant workers, and works by high-profile media artists such as Hito Steyerl and Ming Wong, Feng-Mei Heberer showcases contemporary video productions that trouble the mainstream culture industry's insistence on portraying ethnic Asians as congenial to dominant neoliberal values. Undermining the demands placed on Asian subjects to exemplify institutional diversity and individual exceptionalism, this book provides a critical and nuanced set of alternatives to the easily digestible forms generated by online streaming culture and multicultural lip service more broadly. Employing feminist, racial, and queer critiques of the contemporary media landscape, Asians on Demand highlights how the dynamics of Asian representation play out differently in Germany, the United States, Taiwan, and Spain. Rather than accepting the notion that inclusion requires an uncomplicated set of appearances, the works explored in this volume spotlight a staunch resistance to formulating racial identity as an instantly accessible consumer product.

Weight: 262g
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 12 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781517914813