Dylan Rodriguez has drawn attention to how the #StopAsianHate consensus, which drummed up excitement by Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike for representation in mainstream media art, contributed to critical lacunae about Asian American partnerships with Zionism. Such work harkens back to the absence of discussions about television in Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971), in which the medium appears, if at all, as a vehicle for racist and imperial ideologemes. The papers of this panel seek to address this gap between the state of discourse in the media landscape and our interdiscipline’s radical commitments to collective liberation.

To that end, this panel displaces what panelist Melissa Phruksachart wrote about in early 2020 as messianic visibility: the widespread faith that popular media representation would deliver Asian Americans from harm – which became even more pronounced in the years that followed. Focusing on television’s formal seriality and processes of adaptation, we revert neither to the outright dismissal of media’s imaginative pleasures nor to the facile celebration of cultural representation apart from the political crises unfolding around us by reading the medium’s embedded racialized aesthetic logics. This session will be moderated by Peter X. Feng, whose work has consistently offered Asian American studies a way beyond the liberal impasses of stereotype critique. Together, we ask: How can critical practice reorient our relationship to the medium of television beyond its images? What are the possibilities of television after the critique of its failed representational realism and corporate political economy?