ABSTRACT
Asian-American artistic representations developed in the 1960s and 1970s in a context during which minorities' rights, whether they be those of women or ethnic minorities, were at the core of social movements. Cinematic representations were one of the numerous means used in the media industry as well as the cultural sphere to fight against mainstream and dominant representations of Asian Americans. Various anthologies of film criticisms and of Asian-American studies thus flourished between the 1970s and the 2010s to explore these prolific creative endeavours. They explore the tensions and variations in the meanings of Chineseness developed in those cinematic productions. These tensions result from the entanglement of questions of race, gender and nationality. The Wedding Banquet. and Saving Face (Alice Wu, 2004) offer relevant illustrations of the tensions derived from representations of Chineseness in Asian-American productions, a tension we may interpret as being at the heart of the dialectics of the margins and the mainstream.
