Benjamin Han’s article left me a little confused and
wishing to hear more at the same time. My biggest issue is that the article
starts with the intention of analyzing how this TV channel encodes meaning and
imagines Asian American audiences, but it ends up making an audience based argument
to explain the demise of ImaginAsian instead of a market based analysis (which
is actually there in the article, but not as the main argument!). Han argues
that the main reason why ImaginAsian failed is the fact that they envisioned a
homogeneous Asian American community and used English as their main language. He
suggests that “ImaginAsian TV failed to recognize the complex composition of
the Asian American population regarding generational differences, cultural
identities, and histories that were too fragmented for an Asian American
channel to accommodate with English language subtitles” (281). But there is no
audience research mentioned to back up this claim at all. Later in the article
it becomes clear that ImaginAsian failed not because of English language
programming/subtitles, but because there was no space or need in the market for
such TV channel in the contemporary moment: Asian Americans already have easy
access to local shows through various online streaming services, and ImaginAsian
couldn’t come up with original content to lure in neither audiences nor the
investors.
I wish the article told us more about how ImaginAsian
imagined Asian American audiences through a closer reading of its programming,
flow, and the choices of local shows included from various countries. I also
wanted to read more about the transnational flows of TV, particularly in the context
of local Asian shows and how they travel around the world, and how ImaginAsian
tries to situate itself within this flow.
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