ABSTRACT
In The Introduction I wrote of the politics of pleasure and argued that we must take such a politics seriously in order to appreciate its power even as we interrogate its effects. These modes of appreciation and critique are essential when we analyze racial representation in popular culture. The pleasure we experience in images, spectacle, and narrative can be simultaneously seductive, insidious, empowering, life-giving. A strategically deployed critical consciousness would require a sensitivity to this complexity. Such a pursuit would comprise at least two general forms of subversion. 1 When we speak of an oppressive politics of representation in film, theater, and television, the dominant minimizes oppositional critique through the pleasures of narrative (“It’s such a beautiful story”), of the visual (spectacle, cinematography), and through a sharp distinction between fiction and fact (“It’s just a story”; “It’s just a satire”). One tactic depends on deconstructing the dominant and exposing these ruses of power. Another tactic could be called a strategic deployment of authenticity that would create alternative visions to oppressive representations: spaces where those of us on the margins could “write our faces.” Here, the pleasures for Asian American audiences would be those of self-recognition and empowerment. Though radical separation from the dominant is impossible, these faces might be ones we could at last recognize as ours. Both tactics and their myriad context-specific variations must be part of a repertoire of activist strategies.
