Description
Book SynopsisCeline Parreñas Shimizu examines early twenty-first-century cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American children, showing how films allow viewers the opportunity to understand the demands and difficulties placed upon Asian American children.
Trade Review“The relative absence of Asian Americans on the silver screen makes their representation something we cannot not want. In this profound and personal meditation, Celine Parreñas Shimizu cautions us not to assume that representation and belonging go hand in hand. Instead, she analyzes depictions of childhood in Asian American cinema as occasions for working through the psychic traumas that overdetermine our social attachments from the very moment we are born into a world of racial loss and grief.” -- David L. Eng, coauthor of * Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans *
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The Movies of Racial Childhoods is like nothing I have ever read. It is a document of a mother grieving, a film scholar theorizing the healing work of narrative cinema, and a filmmaker who understands that ‘trauma demands representation so as to create new realities.’ Celine Parreñas Shimizu’s writing about the death of her child and her devotion to film is both tender and revelatory. Interweaving psychoanalysis, Asian American studies, trauma theory, cinema studies, and personal narrative, Shimizu cultivates space for us to collectively grieve and to reawaken the possibilities of childhood dreaming.” -- Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of * Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration *
Table of ContentsPreface. Devastated Creator: Theorizing as Grieving Mother-Author-Spectator ix
Acknowledgments xix
Introduction: Agents of Our Own Lives, Centers of Our Own Stories 1
1. A Deluge of Delusions and Lies: Race, Sex, and Class in
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace 41
2. The Inner Life of Cinema and Selfobjects: Queer Asian American Youth in
Spa Night and
Driveways 81
3. Adolescent Curiosity and Mourning:
The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros 117
4. The Courage to Compose Oneself: Healthy Narcissim and Self-Sovereignty in
Yellow Rose 151
5. The Unexpected and the Unforeseen: Cultural Complexes in
The Half of It 186
In Closing: The Power of Films about Racial Childhoods in the Time of Rampant Death 208
Notes 213
Bibliography 223
Index 233
