| Autobiographical movies by contemporary Asian American filmmakers and videomakers often thematize contrasting generational perspectives toward history and memory. These movies construct Asian American subjectivity by recontextualizing family stories, national histories, and media representations of the past. Utilizing self-reflexive, meta-discursive techniques, Asian American film/videomakers comment on the role storytelling plays in connecting individual stories to Asian American histories. Drawing on both documentary and experimental cinematic traditions, Asian American film/videomakers attempt to connect themselves to discontinuous narratives of the past while critiquing discourses of race, ethnicity, and nationality.;Chapter One examines North American film/videomakers (Felicia Lowe, Richard Fung, and Lisa Hsia) who travel to China in search of the birthplaces of their parents. Narratives about China and migration to the U S. are reversed by the children, who grapple with previous representations of China. Chapter Two examines Japanese American film/videomakers (Lise Yasui, Janice Tanaka, and Rea Tajiri) who struggle with their parents' inability to speak about their incarceration in U.S. Internment Camps during World War Two, recovering memory as that which is suppressed yet cannot be contained by history. Chapter Three examines performer/filmmaker Tiana (Thi Thanh Nga), who critiques U.S. media representations of the war in Vietnam while admitting that her own subjectivity and career in Hollywood were constructed by those very representations.;This dissertation draws on the insights of three theorists who explore the constitution of subjectivity by/through discursive interplay. Theodor Adorno's excursus on "Subject and Object" explores how consciousness emerges from subjective reflection on the nature of objects before it. Mikhail Bakhtin argues that subjectivity is formed with reference to surrounding "socio-ideologically alien" languages. Homi Bhabha's theory of "hybridity" argues that counterhegemonic discourse emerges from the contradictions of colonial discourse.;In the conclusion, this dissertation argues that the discontinuous past narrated in the preceding chapters is remobilized in the service of Asian American pan-ethnicity (after Yen Le Espiritu), that the construction of specific ethnic-subjectivities in relation to gaps in historical and memorial discourses opens the door for Asian American subjectivities (defined in relation to "strategic essentialism"). |
