Required Reading
- Ansari, Aziz. “Aziz Ansari on Acting, Race, and Hollywood” (Links to an external site.) from New York Times (November 10, 2015)
- “Inequality in 1,200 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007-2018 (Links to an external site.)” from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (September 2019) — skim these findings.
- Huang, Eddie. “Bamboo-Ceiling TV” (Links to an external site.) from New York Magazine (January 2015)
- Hsu, Hua. “‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and the End Point of Representation” (Links to an external site.)from the New Yorker (August 2018)
This week we actually start the process for the final paper, because no new instructional material will be posted for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
Final Paper Guidelines
The goal is to produce a rough draft for your final paper by Saturday, November 30, 2019, which will undergo a mandatory peer-review process. Note that this weekend is Thanksgiving weekend, so you are encouraged to complete this assignment earlier. Failure to submit a rough draft on time and complete a peer-review will impact your grade.
The final paper is related to representational politics in media/pop culture. The directions of the prompt are as follows:
Read through the assigned articles. While some writers are optimistic, there are also criticisms that you need to understand. Based on your understanding of the readings, analyze what you think are the biggest problems with the representations of Asian Americans in pop culture today. Does the inclusion of a few more Asian Americans in mainstream media (such as movies, television, theatre) reflect a bigger change from racist/stereotypical depictions in the past? Are some of these more recent representations reflecting a “step forward” or are there still problems with these roles in that they tend to favor certain perspectives over others? Are these depictions just tokenism in action?
As a part of your research, you will need to spend some time with Asian American media and watch some of the shows discussed (e.g., Aziz Ansari’s Master of None or Fresh Off the Boat, based off Eddie Huang’s memoirs are two good places to begin since they are a part of the readings, as well as recent examples such as Crazy Rich Asians or Always Be My Maybe — but you are more than welcome to explore others that are relevant). Some are accessible for free on network television or through some websites (such as ABC’s), others are based on subscription services (Netflix and Hulu). If media access will be a problem for you, please contact me to make alternative arrangements.
Checklist of requirements (failure to meet each of will impact your grade):
- Paper must have a clear ARGUMENT. You are not simply giving an overview of the issue. Take a position.
- Do NOT summarize articles. The articles should be quoted selectively. Do not dedicate a paragraph to repeating what someone else already wrote.
- Requires outside research. You can start with the resources listed, but you need to integrate at least 3-4 additional outside research sources that you find yourself. These must be included in your works cited page.
- Requires actual viewing of recent media. You cannot write about representations of Asian Americans if you have not seen any recently, nor can you just rely on some hazy memory of watching Rush Hour 2 when you were in middle school. More importantly, please do not utilize Jackie Chan as an example, unless you are fully cognizant of the implications of using Jackie Chan in a paper about Asian American media.
- The final paper will be 1,500-2,100 words in length
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