Ray Kyooyung Ra – Core Response #4 (Week 7)

Benjamin Han identifies the reasons behind ImaginAsian TV’s failure to attract lucrative Asian/ American audiences in its attempts to construct a homogenous, transnational audience through the English language as well as the channel’s overlooking alternative methods of content viewing for its prime target audience. Something that struck me from Han’s analysis of ImaginAsian TV was that, specifically, while discussing the miscalculation on the part of Michael Hong, Han briefly talks about popular American media’s skew toward East Asia in terms of representation. While the quality of East Asian representation in American television could be further debated, this idea did help me draw parallels between Han’s article with the prior readings we had on Lipsitz’s investigation of television within socioeconomic contexts, along with the discourse surrounding Black representation in productions such as The Cosby Show.

Minority representation is primarily decided on their degree of assimilation to the normative American lifestyle as well as the niche audience’s potential as an exploitable market; the latter which Gray expands on in his article. Is this idea applicable to the Asian audience that Han explored? I believe so. East Asian markets have been historically identified as more lucrative, as well as seen as more culturally exposed to non-Asian Americans through assimilation that opened more potential for comedy material (i.e. Fresh Off the Boat).

As long as diversity is conformed to the normative, white, middle-class, nuclear family form, ethnic representation on the American television screen is possible. Naturally, South Asians, often stereotyped into dual socioeconomic profiling (either of uneducated, lower class working families running a convenience store or the snobbish, opportunistic software programmers) or often criminalized and associated with gang activities in California, are often pushed out to the blind margins when the homogenous Asian American audience for television is imagined. Often times, within a homogenized chunk of a certain ethnic population in America, representation of one minority group comes at the expense of another as such. The hyphenated American identity is, ultimately, relegated to the unseen unless strictly or closely conformed to the normatively American.