Historically, U.S. popular culture has contributed to the making of a national public sphere that narrowly defines citizenship with heteronormative whiteness, perpetuated through mass mediated narratives, characters, celebrity culture, and racial stereotypes. The recent visibility of Asian and Asian American comedians, pop music icons, and actors leading U.S. blockbuster films has encouraged discussion amongst Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans (APIDAs) of their presence and claims to the national public sphere. Expansive offerings of Asian diasporic and APIDA content, such as reality television, stand-up comedy specials, sitcoms, and superhero and romantic-comedy movies on streaming networks and filtered through its generic conventions of storytelling similarly signal how global media corporations have enabled, yet constrained the racial, gendered, class, and sexual representations of Asian diasporic and APIDA identities, cultures, and experience. Yet, such globally mediated content, including social media, has also generated transformative acts of fandom for Asian Americans audiences.
Join our students, activists, and scholars as we explore problematic and essentialist representations of APIDAs in popular media, as well as grassroots-level and social media-based pushback and resistance to these representations. Our broad questions, inspired by multiple meanings implied in “sustainable publics” are: 1) Given that representation influences self-perception and beliefs, what myths, ideas, assumptions, and stereotypes does popular media sustain (and perpetuate) from its [mis]representation of APIDA publics? 2) Considering that media is as powerful a force only because of how and whom it [mis]represents, how might we reimagine publics that are truly and genuinely sustainable?