Abstract
This study examines Chinese American self-representation in Hollywood cinema across four historical periods: the pre-1960s, the Civil Rights era of the 1960s to 1970s, the neoliberal transition of the 1980s to 1990s, and the globalized post-2000s. Using interpretative film analysis, I analyze Christine Choy’s From Spikes to Spindles (1976), Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Jon Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians (2018) to explore how Chinese American filmmakers respond to shifting political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. My findings show that representation evolved from collective activism and self-assertion during the Asian American Movement, to the assimilationist “model minority” environment under neoliberalism, to a globalized form of celebratory multiculturalism. Each film reflects its time period’s dominant ideology: activist solidarity of the 1960s/70s in Choy’s documentary, hybrid identity and queerness of the 1980s/90s in Lee’s film, and commodified inclusion of the post-2000s in Chu’s film. Together, they trace the transformation of Chinese American identity from marginalization to visibility, revealing how self-representation in film mirrors broader historical and ideological change in America.
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