Japanese Journal of Communication Studies Vol.45 No.2, 2017 105-113 Ⓒ2017 日本コミュニケーション学会 The Shifting Landscape of Asian Americans in the Media１） ONO, Kent A. （University of Utah） Representations of Asians and Asian Americans in U.S. media and film have changed over time. In this context, one of the main questions scholars ask is whether or not those changes, cumulatively, have improved the representational landscape, kept it steady, or actually made things worse for Asians and Asian Americans. In this article, I review scholarship in the field of Asian and Asian American film and media; discuss historical representations of Asians and Asian Americans; suggest a few contemporary representational strategies Asian Americans are using to problematize dominant representations of them; and then think through, more specifically, recent media representations of Asians and Asian Americans, as well as of Asia, particularly Japan. Much of what I have to say here was spelled out more fully in Vincent Pham’s and my book, Asian Americans and the Media. The first scholarly books about representations of Asian Americans addressed film. In 1955, Dorothy Jones published The Portrayal of China and India on the American Screen, 1896-1955. It would be 23 years before the second major book, Eugene Wong’s On Visual Media Racism: Asians in the American Motion Picture, would come out. Both books were about cinema; but notably, Wong’s book was critical and focused on racism while Jones was more descriptive. Thus, scholars usually regard On Visual Media Racism as the inaugural book in Asian American Studies of media and film. It would be another 13 years before the next significant book would appear. Russell Leong’s Moving the Image, published in 1991, introduced book chapters written by independent filmmakers primarily discussing Asian American filmmaking, but also addressing aesthetics and other topics. Gina Marchetti’s book Romance and the“Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction came out two years later, continuing earlier work by Jones and Wong to examine Hollywood portrayals but also bringing a gendered perspective to scholarship in the process. Darrell Hamamoto’s 1994 Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation was the first book on Asians and Asian Americans to examine television specifically. Hamamoto drew a correlation ―1 0 5― between TV representations of Asian Americans and U.S. global relations with Asian countries.２） After a six-year hiatus, the 2000s introduced four key books on representations of Asians and Asian Americans（Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu; Peter Feng; Peter Feng; and Elena Tajima Creef）. Hamamoto and Liu’s book Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism significantly updated the conversations around Asian American film by introducing reception studies and theoretical approaches to the study of film, as well as gender and sexuality. Feng’s two books Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video and Screening Asian Americans brought the field of film studies into consideration; deeply involved in both theory and history of film, Feng’s works increased the scholarly grounding of the field and rendered this subarea a serious one for investigation. Finally, Creef’s book Imagining Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body brought a visual culture, feminist, multimedia, and cultural studies approach to studies of Asian and Asian American representation, specifically focusing on Japanese Americans across multiple media. The 21st-century saw a renaissance of scholarship on Asian and Asian American representation, with a series of books in the first decade（Parrenas; Daisuke Miyao; Kent Ono and Vincent Pham; Jane Park; Brian Locke; Glen Mimura）and even more books already published in this second decade（Jeanette Roan; Celine Parrenas Shimizu; Gina Marchetti; Shilpa Dave; Ruth Mayer; David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu; Jun Okada; Lori Lopez）.３） Without going into tremendous detail, these works include analyses of multimedia, visual culture more generally, and the digital. Moreover, whereas there was a focus on“stereotypes” in earlier scholarship, today’s work has largely been influenced by cultural studies, particularly Stuart Hall’s contributions. Thus, as a whole, this work makes clear, first, that the meaning of a stereotype is not fixed; second, that representations change over time; and third, that the articulation of social forces may produce a particular kind of representation, depending on the cultural condition influencing it. From the earliest research on Asian and Asian American representation, there was a transnational element associated with Asian and Asian American representations. Dorothy Jones was aware that Hollywood was producing representations of Asian peoples, and Eugene Wong followed that up by emphasizing the racist impact of such images on Asian Americans. It is important to say that Asians and Asian Americans were represented in media in particular ways. Many define such representations as stereotypes, but cultural studies has altered our view of stereotypes and how they function. Moreover, representation is more complex than just looking at racially negative or problematic images of people. A stereotype can change over time, and the cultural context in which a stereotype forms and functions ―1 0 6― may change, too. A stereotype is a specialized kind of articulation that is the product of an alliance of forces at a given place and time. Thus, as forces change, so do stereotypes. Key stereotypes of Asians and Asian Americans within U.S. media include the“yellow peril,”the idea of the Asian and Asian American horde（Gina Marchetti; Robert Lee; Gary Okihiro）. Dating back at least to representations of Genghis Khan, the yellow peril is a fear produced and then circulated, often significantly aided by media. It portrays Asian people as ready and able to take over and overwhelm（in this case）U.S. culture and society, while also portraying whites as vulnerable or in danger. Another key representation of Asians and Asian Americans is“yellow face.”In our book, Asian Americans and the Media, Vincent Pham and I discuss two types of yellow face: explicit yellow face and implicit yellow face. Explicit yellow face is when someone who is neither Asian nor Asian American plays the role of an Asian or Asian American character. Historically, in Hollywood, this meant white people wearing make up and clothing to make them“look Asian”and then speaking jibberish or highly affected speech with no real connection to an Asian language. Perhaps the most famous historical examples of this kind of representation are Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s（1961）and Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed（1944）, but it persists into the present, for example in a 2014 episode of How I Met Your Mother（“Slapsgiving ３”）. Implicit yellow face is when:（１） Asians or Asian Americans themselves play the role of a generic“Asian”person and often have make up and clothing and an exaggerated accent, as well;（２）actors play a generic Asianness with no connection to real Asian or Asian American ethnic groups, o（r ３）players are encouraged to play Asians or Asian Americans（e.g., on as video game characters）. Thus, each of these aspects of yellow face has to do with racial masquerade and the pleasures and problematics associated with them. Asians and Asian Americans often appear as comic relief. In a similar way to the way African Americans have been represented this way（e.g., minstrel characters）, Asians and Asian Americans often appear as the butt of jokes（e.g., Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles）. Thus, Asians and Asian Americans are not to be taken seriously. Our humanity and our perspective are unimportant, indeed（at times）laughable. Contemporarily, Ken Jeong, an Asian American actor, often gets slotted into comedic roles that ask him to play the role of a buffoon. For instance, in a photo spread titled“Just the Two of Us”in the men’s magazine GQ, in 2011, Jeong listed as a“funnyman,”is the“third wheel”to a white heterosexual couple who appear as if in romantic interludes. Key to this representation is the representation of Jeong as sexually undesirable. Asians and Asian Americans have also been constructed sexually. Men and women have been represented in a divergent fashion, but through analysis it is clear that these different representations are systematically connected. For instance, men have been represented as ―1 0 7― Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, or model minorities（Laura Kang; Jachinson Chan）. Women have been constructed as dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, or madame butterflies. First, it should be noted that a dragon lady is basically coincident with Fu Manchu in that both characters are highly sexual, but instead of being a sexual deviant, a dragon lady is sexually desirable, albeit dangerous because she is treacherous, evil, and uses sexuality for power. Moreover, these relationships conform to colonial representation, with men being constructed as unable to be ethical, moral, and sexually desirable suitors for Asian and Asian American women, and Asian and Asian American women being constructed as sexually desirable, supplicant, obsequious, and ideal suitors for white men. As Laura Kang suggests, this colonial construction of sexuality is the colonizers’ fantasy, which nevertheless has repercussions for the psychology of Asians and Asian Americans. The psychological dimension of representations of Asians and Asian Americans not only affects Asian Americans, but arguably larger media publics. Thus, a recurring representation of Asians and Asian Americans has to do with whether or not they can be legitimate members of U.S. society. The“forever foreigner”stereotype typically constructs Asians and Asian Americans as unassimilable and from outside of the United States, regardless of citizenship. Given the history of Asians and Asian Americans not being included as rightful members of the U.S. polity, it seems quite contradictory that arguably the primary stereotype of Asians and Asian Americans today and for the last fifty years has been the model minority.