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"LEILANI NISHIME"
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Critical Approaches to the Climate Crisis
This essay turns to theories developed in critical rhetoric and cultural studies to give us an alternate understanding of what is at stake in the climate crisis and offer tools to respond to the crisis. Scholars from those fields, especially decolonial scholars, help us access alternate scales of both time and geography by shifting our perspective from universal to specific, from dominant to insurgent, and, even from human to more-than-human. This article focuses on examples that can expand our understanding of who can combat climate change, what counts as climate activism, and our epistemological understanding of the climate crisis. Through an attention to power and the centering of those most marginalize and, consequently, those most affected by the climate crisis, Communication studies can give us the tools to address climate anxiety and envision a better, more sustainable, and more sustaining future.
Journal Article
Undercover Asian
In this first book-length study of media images of multiracial Asian Americans, Leilani Nishime traces the codes that alternatively enable and prevent audiences from recognizing the multiracial status of Asian Americans. Nishime's perceptive readings of popular media--movies, television shows, magazine articles, and artwork--indicate how and why the viewing public often fails to identify multiracial Asian Americans. Using actor Keanu Reeves, the Matrix trilogy, and golfer Tiger Woods as examples, Nishime suggests that this failure is tied to gender, sexuality, and post-racial politics. Also considering alternative images such as reality TV star Kimora Lee Simmons, the television show Battlestar Galactica, and the artwork of Kip Fulbeck, this incisive study offers nuanced interpretations that open the door to a new and productive understanding of race in America.
eBook
Whitewashing Yellow Futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, and Advantageous: Gender, Labor, and Technology in Sci-fi Film
This article examines racial transformation in three recent science films within the context of the entertainment industry practice of whitewashing Asian characters. It argues that the shift from yellowface to whitewashing in mainstream cinema manages anxieties about highly gendered transpacific labor migration under globalization. Cloud Atlas and Ex Machina portray a social logic that treats racialized bodies as prosthetic selves-disposable laboring avatars that inhibit white male subjectivity and must be abandoned for white females to transcend social barriers. Advantageous returns to these same themes, but, by centering the subjectivity of its Asian female lead, demonstrates the true costs of fantasies of a whitewashed future.
Journal Article
The Matrix Trilogy and Multiraciality at the End of Time
This book opened with Keanu Reeves as a symbol par excellence of the flexibility of Asian racialization in visual culture, a flexibility that enables mainstream media narratives to represent racial categories as irrelevant while still punishing those who would not adhere to racial hierarchies. The three case studies analyzed in the first half of this book all document the role of visual representations in racialization despite the continued disavowal of meaningful racial distinctions on the part of media producers and consumers alike. Reeves again takes center stage in this chapter, but this time his appearance marks a shift in the
Book Chapter
Aliens
As the last two chapters have shown, the spectacle of multiracial celebrity provides a prominent site for audiences to explore and often willfully ignore the histories and meanings of race in the United States. However, fictional narratives focused primarily on multiracial people are few and far between in story-driven visual culture such as television and film. When multiracial characters appear, they are often peripheral to the plot or are the surprise twist at the end of the movie, as inDevil in the Blue DressandThe Human Stain. They appear even less frequently on the small screen. While multiracial
Book Chapter
Multiracial Asian Americans and the Myth of the Mulatto Millennium
In tracing the history and continued significance of multiracial representations, this book challenges a dominant U.S. cultural narrative. That narrative imagines multiracial people as symbols of the declining significance of race.¹ In order to promise a race-free future, we must perceive multiracial people as an unprecedented social development. Much of the popular, political, and academic discourse positions multiracial people at the fulcrum of shifting racial demographics. The oft-cited 1993Timecover story, which showcased a woman computer-morphed from photographs of people of different races, was, after all, titled “The New Face of America.”²
In the years following theTimecover,
Book Chapter
Tiger Woods and the Perils of Colorblind Celebrity
For many, Tiger Woods—undoubtedly the single most famous multiracial African/Asian American in the world—symbolizes multiraciality. He is both the singular and prototypical multiracial Asian. The narrative of his celebrity (before the scandal of his extramarital affairs) depended on his difference from everyone else, melding a worshipful admiration of his exceptional athleticism with his racial exceptionalism. Yet as contradictory as it may seem, it is this very discourse of exceptionalism thattypifiesso much of our public conversation about multiracial people. Rather than seeing Woods as a particular case with little to say about race generally, we can paradoxically
Book Chapter
Seeing Multiracial
In 2006, Kip Fulbeck published a book of photographs titledPart Asian, 100% Hapa.¹ The images were taken from his larger art piece titledThe Hapa Project, for which Fulbeck traveled across the country photographing and speaking to people who self-identified as multiracial Asian/Pacific Americans.² It has since become one of the most widely viewed examples of visual culture expressly committed to depicting multiracial Asian Americans. As of 2011, the exhibit had traveled from the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to New York, North Carolina, Chicago, and Portland, and Fulbeck has spoken about his work on CNN and
Book Chapter