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Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. By Peter X. Feng. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
In the introduction to his 2002 edited collection, Screening Asian Americans, Peter X. Feng describes Asian American film studies' incipient stage in which "every essay on Asian American cinema is forced to define its parameters, to constitute the field of inquiry afresh" (7). That Feng's own scholarship goes a long way toward establishing significant points of reference in a fast-developing field is evident in his 2002 monograph, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. This text is sure to be "required reading," not only for Asian American film studies, but for Asian American Studies more generally. Unlike such texts as Gina Marchetti's Romance and the "Yellow Peril" (1993) and Eugene Franklin Wong's On Visual Media Racism (1978), which concentrate their analyses on the Orientalist portrayals in mainstream American films, Feng's Identities in Motion focuses on those films and videos with Asian Americans behind the camera. A few edited collections have provided a meeting place for this conversation, including Russell Leong's Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts (1991), Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu's Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism (2000), and, of course, Feng's own edited collection Screening Asian Americans, but Identities in Motion is more akin to Jun Xing's Asian America Through the Lens (1998) as a monograph offering a sustained analysis of the politics of representing identity and history. The unique and important contribution of Feng's text is its theory of racialized representations, based in the specifics of film and video, yet with larger repercussions for how we conceive of identity, stereotypes, and political resistance.
Eschewing what Darrell Y. Hamamoto, in his introduction to Countervisions, calls "the excesses of psychoanalytic abstractions and theoreticism" (3), Feng offers with remarkable clarity a sophisticated theory of representation and identity formation, grounded in close readings of the visual texts, detailed production histories, and historical and political frameworks, that should resonate with the various audiences of Asian American Studies, film studies, and even scholars of autobiography and historical reference. Identities in Motion has as its central concern the ambivalence that necessarily marks Asian American production as these film- and video-makers (or, as Feng abbreviates them, "makers") must...