ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author posit the term "identity aesthetics" as an alternative to "identity politics" for describing the existence of critical, abstract or oblique references to racial identity that are beyond the usual investments in race by texts and authors, particularly as the former term refers to groups or collectivity. She specifically examines how the work of mixed race filmmaker and photographer Laurel Nakadate illustrates such an Asian American postracial discourse. In fact, Nakadate's work even seems aggressively antithetical to this collectivity in fetishizing the aesthetics of loneliness. Nakadate's deployment of identity aesthetics in order to question Asian American collectivity can also be seen within the specifically "relational" interaction between the artist and her subjects. Nakadate's work troubles the narrative of an unbroken, historically rooted Asian American media production that grew out of a sense of racial resistance and racial solidarity.
