The Arrival of Asian American Mass Culture

Mass culture is not a term that Asian American studies has taken seriously up to this point, preferring, instead, the playground of popular culture. Understandably focused on examples that recognize, (mis)represent, and/or define people of Asian descent, Asian American studies has long traced how Asian Americans are presented in popular media forms, and the systemic construction of durable yet malleable images that circumscribe Asia and Asian/American people. These fluctuating positions ascribed to Asians within the American cultural imagination have real effects for Asian Americans in terms of economic opportunity, structures of romantic desire, and physical safety. Indeed, because of the relationship between how Asian Americans are imagined and the roles that they are assigned in everyday life, popular culture has been viewed as a race-building exercise, and thus a battleground for Asian America itself to define, defend, or articulate its character.

Perhaps, though, it is time to introduce another analytical approach that understands Asian American people and cultural products as being recognizable and marketable as mass culture. That is not to say that Asian America itself has become a "mass culture" in its essence, but, rather, that Asian America has arrived at a moment when it can serve as a signifier for certain mass cultural products — where audiences are able to consume "Asian America" through cultural forms that appeal to mass tastes. When Asian America can be glimpsed through dispersed popular representative constellations and also a recognizable mass cultural form, critics must discern how powerful forces, both inside and outside the Asian American community, style and circulate Asian American cultural commodities. While the expansionist forces of globalization and neoliberal multiculturalism have created the conditions for this arrival, the emergence of Asian American mass culture necessitates both recognition and close scrutiny of its aesthetic designs.

Asian American mass culture changes how we understand Asian America to be imagined, projected, and consumed. Mass-marketed television shows like Fresh off the Boat, blockbuster films like Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All at Once, the proliferation of children's and genre fiction replete with Asian American characters and settings, and the massive influences of Asian Americans on "global products" like K-pop (serving as writers, producers, and performers) demonstrate how Asian American style circulates as a signifier in cultural economic arenas in ways that are unprecedented. Even within the US nation itself, an Asian American style is no longer be considered a niche product produced and consumed by a minor community. Instead, Asian America is stretching its wings across the US where boba shops, sriracha t-shirts, and Asian American mass media can, increasingly, be found in even the most remote regions of the country. This Asian American style does not market just one ethnic group (Vietnamese American, Chinese American, etc.) but rather functions as a commodity form that signifies across various Asian American communities, producing useful merchandise with cultural cache and commercial profit.

Is this "success," then, best understood as one of Asian American popular culture or mass culture? While one can study many of these commercially successful works through either lens, a critical difference between popular and mass culture can be found in their scale and models of production. Popular culture is generated by a particular group of people who also serve as the primary consumers, whereas the evolution of mass culture is a modern phenomenon inextricably bound with the creation of mass media. That is, the technological revolution in post-1945 America created powerful broadcasting tools where the nation itself is defined and consolidated, in part, through radio, television, film, and advertising.¹ Instead of targeting pre-existing enclave audiences, these commercially oriented cultural forms are designed (and imagined) to create masses by being broad enough, in terms of their style and narrative content, to appeal everyone, regardless of race, class, education, gender, and so forth. The Frankfurt School saw this culture industry as stripping the art object from its immanent meaning and context, using it to construct other relations, where art and culture were reduced to its exchange value and instrumental use rather than their particular qualities.² Building from this line of thinking, this cluster argues that today's Asian America mass media products are, from their very inception, produced with a careful eye towards their exchange value. This approach questions how closely political significance, narrative choices, and aesthetic formulations are tied to instrumental imaginative notions of marketability and mass reception, but also how the arrival of this mass style creates new relational bonds.

A mass media form requires a large institutional network, powered by an immense amount of capital that can be owned only by the very few. The mass culture model imagines that a small number of powerful people produce culture that is consumed by an undifferentiated mass who absorb and consume it in an indiscriminate manner. For Jean Baudrillard the production of mass culture itself produces the phantasm of the mass, which is impossible to grasp sociologically.³ The mass is a diffuse body that does not "need political consciousness, or cultural consciousness in order to have a cultural reaction."⁴ Baudrillard, therefore, sees popular and mass culture as entirely different entities, where "popular culture meant, precisely, limited cultures, that is cultures whose sphere, whose dimensions were limited, though intense. Whereas mass culture is a totally diffuse culture."⁵ The popular, then, is defined by and defines itself through the recognition of its own codes and styles, fundamentally limiting its circulatory reach. And while the popular is theoretically accessible to anyone who recognizes the code, only so many can "get" popular culture. Mass culture on the other hand provides sets of signs and symbols that feel much broader in scope, and therefore less local in the narratives that they can convey — running counter to conventional understandings of the enclave position and aesthetic appeal traditionally associated with Asian American cultural products.

Properly locating the place of this emerging Asian American mass culture requires a reexamination the groundbreaking works of Robert Lee's 1999 monograph Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture⁶ and East of Main Street: Asian Americans and Popular Culture, an edited collection created by Shilpa Davé, and LeiLani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren from 2005.⁷ Each book engages in a similar cataloguing of a "new" emergence Asian American cultural objects, deftly moving through a variety of representations, commercial products, and performances, demonstrating how race making occurs through popular forms. However, I would argue that this late 1990s to early 2000s moment differs from the one that we are in now on two fronts. First, a large part of what makes the scholarship in these books remarkable is that they are able to notice and pull together seemingly disparate forms and objects to form an argument about Asian American popular culture. In other words, an academic eye performs the trick of bringing these previously embedded objects to the forefront, where they can sit together as a collective grammar. This contrasts to the current moment, in which we do not require an academic perspective to notice the presence of and relationship between, say, Everything Everywhere All at Once or To All the Boys I've Loved Before, because commercial institutions will do this for us, through cross promotional advertising and consumer algorithms. The very inception and formulation of these works are predicated on market-tested parameters that provide established patterns of commercial reception. Second, each book frames their explorations in the language of "visibility" and "inclusion" of Asian Americans in popular culture, again, positing an argument that Asian American culture has force in the popular imagination. The academic voice, in the earlier cases, performs the Asian American entity into being, where the Asian American culture, in many ways, could not speak for itself — or at least it required an act of collecting to properly be seen as Asian American. In the present moment, commercially, it is given. The presupposition of a uniquely Asian American perspective, taste, and/or production, forms the basis for the consumer to choose this category. Much like so-called national cuisines (be they Chinese, Mexican, or Italian), one is now able to select an Asian American category without having to be part of the coded popular culture world that Baudrillard delineates, or produce it through academic inquiry and methods. Instead, the Asian American is now available via the click of a button, a listicle, or a quick Google search.

However, while producers may imagine that mass culture is consumed by an undifferentiated mass in an indiscriminate manner, the reception of Asian American mass culture is racially charged and coded. To better understand this reception, it is instructive to turn to another careful consideration of Asian American popular culture, Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu's 2007 edited volume Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America. This book examines the vexed representations of Asian Americans in popular media, highlighting how the editors/authors navigated their own desires and conflicted feelings about the images available to them growing up in the 1980s and 1990s. This perspective approaches popular culture by centering Asian Americans as the consumers being studied, highlighting how the circulation of images is interpreted and felt by Asian American subjects.⁸ For them this critical and feeling subject is formed by popular culture, but in such a way that their inner lives are not completely colonized by the popular imagination. Rather, Ngyuen and Nguyen Tu emphasize how the negotiation is strategic, supposing that popular forms can be inhabited, and focusing their analysis on how "Asian Americans 'get to' participate in it and how might their participation shape its contours."⁹ In this light, their approach "is not that popular culture distracts us, seducing our more utopian longings from the arena of politics, but that politics must also learn to produce and create affect effectively."¹⁰ Their inquiry elucidates the relationships between affect and politics, questioning if producers can create oppositional popular culture during a time when multiculturalism rewards those who highlight cultural differences as exotic and new.¹¹ Ngyuen and Nguyen Tu's approach is useful when thinking about an Asian American mass culture that owes its existence to the categorical indexing operation of multiculturalism. At this juncture, however, part of what the Asian American commodity sells is the creation of a new "feeling subject"—one that is supposedly inhabitable by anyone. Even if the content itself highlights conflicts, misunderstandings, or the racism faced by Asian American subjects, the form of the Asian American mass culture narrative and its existence next to other mass cultural forms smooths out, routinizes, and/or underplays structural disjunctive effects and assumes an unproblematic reception.

Mass culture has often been posited as the mere inverse of high culture — a perspective that spans the political spectrum from Matthew Arnold to Theodor Adorno — who see mass culture as an ideological veil that dupes the masses into either political acquiescence, a capitulation to base desires, or at the very least a mechanism that diffuses energies that could be more productively put to use. Perhaps this why Asian American studies has generally preferred popular culture as an analytical model, as its seemingly fragmented nature holds the possibility of oppositional culture and force. But this cluster of essays follows the lead of Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson to suppose that a closer look at mass culture can unearth utopian qualities intrinsic to the historical and cultural moment from where it is found. Acknowledging the emergence of an Asian American mass cultural form puts the project of Asian America into a new recess of being and possibilities, while offering an opportunity to read and register internal contradictions and energies faced by Asian Americans and the project of Asian America itself. As Jameson explains:

If the function of the mass cultural text is meanwhile seen rather as the production of false consciousness and the symbolic reaffirmation of this or that legitimatizing strategy, even this process cannot be grasped as one of sheer violence (the theory of hegemony is explicitly distinguished from control by brute force) nor as one inscribing the appropriate attitudes upon a blank slate, but must necessarily involve a complex strategy of rhetorical persuasion in which substantial incentives are offered for ideological adherence. We will say that such incentives, as well as the impulses to be managed by the mass cultural text, are necessarily Utopian in nature.¹²

Thinking through such "incentives" and how mass culture bends to accommodate and absorb (parts of) the Asian American project provides a moment to reflect upon the goals, successes, failures, and futures of Asian America. This mass cultural perspective is distinct from the fleetingness of popular culture, where whatever is in fashion flickers and moves forward before timely analysis can solidify around it. A critical academic approach to mass cultural clarifies the "impulses" that consistently need to be managed by the mass cultural text, where we can read the texts symptomatically to locate the historical boundaries of Asian American expression and imaginative constitution.

Reading texts as popular culture holds the promise of being able to wrest symbolic control from powerful entities. But recognizing mass cultural creation and circulation is the practical moment that no longer borrows promise from the future and instead critiques from a position within hegemonic entities to transform symbols and culture and for Asian Americans. Instead of seeing these mass cultural texts as pure distortions of popular consciousness, we could see them as the conditions of a certain collective consciousness. With Jameson explaining again how the theorist can locate and imagine the collectivity:

If the ideological function of mass culture is understood as a process whereby otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses are "managed" and defused, rechanneled and offered spurious objects, then some preliminary step must be theorized in which these same impulses — the raw material upon which the process works — are initially awakened within the very text that seeks to still them.¹³

The act of acknowledging the "impulses" that mass culture tries to "still" reveals the possibility that these energies can be awakened again, but in a new time, a new space, and with new Asian Americans to engage the challenge of creating an Asian American collectivity. While the capital-intensive mass cultural text is created on the basis of exchange value, reexamining and historicizing how these relational bonds are formed and circulated provides insight into the materialization of Asian America itself. Further, in this historical moment Asian Americans and Asian American scholars possess sufficient institutional influence to both produce popular media and engage in critical analysis, giving fresh meaning to Nguyen and Nguyen Tu's call "to produce affect effectively." This does not mean, of course, a liberation of these impulses, and there will always be contradictions, collaborators, and failures; however, as scholars, we must first recognize this arrival of Asian American mass cultural style and critically consider how it is articulated through the overlaps of cultural and economic spheres. The work of collecting is now being done for us, and it is up to us to recognize this new mode of circulation in order to reawaken, rearticulate, and rearrange the flow of these mass cultural forms.

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Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. Since 2021 he has served as the Co-Chair of the Circle for Asian American Studies (CAALS). His first book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, investigates why a number of Southeast Asian American authors have recently embraced the refugee identity as a transformative position. He has co-edited a special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies, titled, "Vietnam, War, and the Global Imagination." His latest publications have appeared in MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Canadian Literature, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.; and Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader. Most recently his research has been supported by the Faculty Fellows Program at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University and also the Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University.

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References

1. Ben Calvert et al., eds., "Mass Culture," Television Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd Edition (Routledge, 2007): 166-168. ↩︎
2. See: Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text, vol 1 (1979): 130.
   Theodore Adorno "Culture Industry Reconsidered," The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge, 1991). ↩︎
3. Jean Baudrillard, "Interview with Jean Baudrillard: From Popular Culture to Mass Culture," Roger Célestin, Contemporary French and Francophone Societies 1, no. 1 (2008), 11. ↩︎
4. Baudrillard, "Interview with Jean Baudrillard," 13. ↩︎
5. Baudrillard, 9. ↩︎
6. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999). ↩︎
7. Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha G. Oren, eds., East of Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2005). ↩︎
8. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Introduction," Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, ed. Mimi Thi Nguyen and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (Duke University Press, 2007), 3. ↩︎
9. Nguyen and Nguyen Tu, "Introduction," 7. ↩︎
10. Nguyen and Nguyen Tu, 10. ↩︎
11. Nguyen and Nguyen Tu, 15. ↩︎
12. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell University Press, 1981): 287. ↩︎
13. Jameson, 287. ↩︎