When Disney+’s Chang Can Dunk was first announced, many questioned the idea of an Asian person centering their story on basketball and — from the look of the photos released at the time — his style of dress, which could be construed as appropriating Black culture to benefit another race’s story.
Continue reading “Jingyi Shao and Bloom Li on Finding Identity in ‘Chang Can Dunk’”
I once heard the great political philosopher and activist Angela Davis argue that Americans are so obsessed with race as an identifying feature that when we meet racially ambiguous people, we are anxious until we know on which side of the color line they fall. Upon hearing this, I was relieved by the articulation of something I had suspected was at the heart of my experience. It was like experiencing great art, that rush of adrenaline that comes with recognizing what we’ve known all along presented as fantastically new.
Continue reading “The ‘Heights’ of Anxiety and the Color Line: Racial Ambiguity in a Culture of Absolutes”
by Steven Barnes | Originally posted on his website
Some time back, I watched a documentary about master Fumio Demura, one of the first to bring authentic Japanese karate (Shito-ryu) to the United States. I thought of him because he was Pat Morita’s stunt double for the Karate Kid movies.
Continue reading “‘Cobra Kai’ and Cultural Appropriation”
LA Times film reporter Jen Yamato is the special guest on Hard NOC Life as we break down the reaction to Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.
Continue reading “‘Isle of Dogs’ and the Need for Film Critics of Color”
Fellow Hard NOC Media podcaster Preeti Chhibber, of Desi Geek Girls, stops by a brand new episode of Southern Fried Asian.
by Trungles
There is an old fairy tale popularized by Hans Christian Andersen as The Little Mermaid. I’m one of those odd first-and-a-half generation Vietnamese American immigrants, and tales of living in between spaces have always held my attention. The story goes that a little princess from a world under water wants to live on the land. She falls in love, exchanges her tongue for a pair of legs, and finds herself thrust into the unenviable circumstance of navigating a strange space where she literally has no voice. Ultimately finding no place for her in the world for which she had given up everything, she casts herself off the side of a ship into the ocean, drowns, and dissolves into sea foam. Victorian sentiments about Christianity and moralizing stories for children eventually got Andersen to amend the ending. This is more or less the state of Asian American identity politics. We’re always finding ourselves caught between “where we come from” and wherever we yearn to belong.
The buzz around the 2017 Ghost in the Shell film, among many other film and television projects of its ilk in recent memory, has ignited a bevy of thinkpieces about cultural appropriation and the nature of Asian American identity politics. The topic is complicated.
Continue reading “‘Ghost in the Shell’ and the Complexity of Cultural Appropriation”
