“Image”-ing Otherwise: the Ambivalent Politics of Asian American Visual Self-Representation in the post-1965 Era

The post-1965 period was a time of growing Asian American visibility alongside massive sociopolitical unrest, both of which threatened the stability of the U.S. racist capitalist system. During this time, U.S. national culture and Asian Americans contended over the visual forms that would lend Asian visibility political coherence; the “model minority,” the “Asian American,” and the Asian suburbanite were three manifestations of these visual politics. Focusing on Los Angeles as an Asian American population center, this thesis will examine visual evidence from the early model minority press (1966), the Asian American Movement's L.A.-based press (1969-1974), and visual representations of built spaces in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley Asian-majority suburb to synthesize an Asian American visual critique that unsettles the fixity of U.S. national racial imaging and rethinks the history of the politics of how Asian American visibility took form. In piecing together a history of three unstable, intersecting visual narratives surrounding a highly volatile American subject, this thesis hopes to recuperate the urgent ambivalence of the radical ‘60s “Asian American” identity, locating roots of contemporary theoretical interventions in the archives of the movements/counter-movements of the mid-1960s. The ambiguous and ambivalent ways Asian Americans visually self re-present constitute a “politics of refusal” that embraces Asian America’s “coherent incoherence” and denies the American mainstream the ability to regulate (and narrate) Asian immigrant presence in America. The inability to define Asian America allows it a continual liminality that imperils static racial formations that serve to uphold U.S. national culture. Within these visual archives, the lack of a fixed Asian American visual subject lends the identity its power and needs to be seen as crucial to the struggle over the public presence of Asian Americans in the U.S. post-1965 era