Asian American Mass Culture

Edited by Leland Tabares and Timothy K. August

Introduction

Asian Americans seem to be everywhere these days. No longer confined to ethnic enclaves or niche subcultures, they populate our television screens winning academy awards and Olympic medals. They inhabit our phones doing short dances to popular music and streaming their daily lives. They speak to us through our headphones with their informed commentaries and sing their latest chart-topping hits. They circulate in our communities as business leaders and politicians, shaping the futures of our neighborhoods and our country. More than being hypervisible, Asian Americans are now hyperpresent. Representational visibility has given way to institutional access, leadership, and, dare we say, power. Asian Americans have become naturalized into the everyday common sense of American culture. They participate not simply as consumers but as cultural producers who dictate our tastes and styles. In this way, Asian America has become synonymous with mass culture.

This cluster, sponsored by the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, approaches the massification of Asian America today as a critical impetus to theorize what we are calling Asian American Mass Culture.¹ More than signaling a phenomenon internal to the Asian American community, Asian American Mass Culture provides an interpretive framework for interrogating the conditions, contexts, and stakes for analyzing Asian America's accretion toward and conflation with mass culture. It reckons with what it means for an historically minoritized community to reach a critical mass. Our deliberate invocation of the term mass culture, rather than, say, popular culture, signifies an attempt not only to account for Asian America's hyperpresence materially across American institutions now two and a half decades into the twenty-first century but also to situate Asian America discursively alongside the critical tradition of thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson to understand how their ideas on mass culture inform our understanding of the current state of Asian America and, vice versa, of what Asian America can teach us about mass culture.

At first, Asian American Mass Culture sounds like an oxymoron. How can the culture of a minority group claim to stand in for the culture of everyone? Isn't Asian America, much like the so-called masses, composed of highly diverse communities with their own unique cultural histories, heritages, and traditions? Isn't their purported mass appeal symptomatic of neoliberal commodity culture, rather than some imagined vision of their collective empowerment? What gets lost or sacrificed in the transition from particularity to universality? What can Asian American Studies, and professional societies like the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, teach us at a time when academic discourse on issues related to Asian American cultural histories are accessible to mainstream publics unlike ever before? Asian American Mass Culture, it would seem, precipitates more questions than answers. Indeed, it not only reveals contradictions but, in fact, exposes itself to be a contraction.

This is precisely the point.

Asian American Mass Culture confronts the contradictory ways that Asian America came to be coterminous with mass culture. It demonstrates how their conflation hinges not on similarity, but rather on difference. This central contradiction is not unique to today. It is rooted in histories of yellow peril that conceived Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who were deemed threatening to the nation-state. Nowhere is this history more observable today than in the public discourse surrounding TikTok. On the one hand, the app is celebrated for providing historically minoritized communities with a steppingstone into the mainstream. Asian American content creators, like Bella Poarch and Michael Le, are among the platform's most popular users. Their successes off the platform, in turn, boost TikTok's market value as a company and brand. On the other hand, TikTok is the target of the Trump administration's techno-Orientalist fears due to its ties to China. Before being bought out by a U.S.-based joint venture LLC in January 2026, in accordance with the Trump administration's 2025 Executive Order "Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security," the platform was created and owned by Beijing-based firm ByteDance. Moreover, the fact that both the platform and many of its diasporic Asian creators skyrocketed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic — a period characterized by widespread anti-Asian rhetoric and violence — illustrates how the conflation of Asian America with mass culture, as Julia H. Lee elsewhere insists, is "not a sign of the nation's progressive willingness to embrace Asian diasporic subjects or productions," let alone "a sign of the nation's desire to live or even envision a more racially just future."² Rather, it is indicative of how the contradictions inherent to a term like Asian American Mass Culture are actually "a function of the way that Asians are racialized in the United States" as subjects who embody contradiction. The violence that befell diasporic Asians during and after the pandemic highlighted how their racialization as purported good minorities — a hallmark of model minority stereotyping — readily succumbed to their characterization as viral threats to the American body politic. The model minority and yellow peril invader are two sides of the same coin.

Historically, when Asian American Studies has examined media forms it has done so by attending to Asian Americans' place in popular culture. This makes sense given both the role that media forms play in the processes of racialization and the participatory promise that popular culture holds as a framework for indexing minority subjecthood. Mass culture, however, signifies something else. It suggests that the battleground has shifted, where representational cultural forms can directly engage corporate management and industry ownership, as Asian Americans come to wield institutional power and maintain their own spheres of influence. Now, more than ever before, Asian Americans are professionalizing in industry spaces where they had been excluded or marginalized just a generation or two prior. If they do not own the means of production, they at least have a say in the production process. Their tastes sell. At the same time, as newer generations come of age alongside newer communication technologies and newer meanings of professional labor, they are beginning to populate an ever widening range of industry fields. As their aspirations expand, so too will their impact. Mass culture is being shaped by and through Asian America.

This cluster situates Asian American Mass Culture as a method for indexing the rise and incorporation of Asian Americans into the institutions, industries, and processes that produce mass culture. It sees Asian American Mass Culture as, at times, new, as well as a byproduct of the past. It calls into question who counts under the masses, while highlighting what kinds of cultural texts, spaces, and interests signify for the masses in our era of neoliberal global capitalism. In this way, Asian American Mass Culture attends to developments in consumer interests and habits, while realizing the peripheries and limits of consumer markets. The essays collected here start these conversations through a range of historically situated discussion topics, thematic focuses, and disciplinary approaches. They showcase the methodological and discursive breadth of scholarship being conducted by members of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies. They survey the production and consumption of Asian American Mass Culture across literature, television, film, streaming media, social media, sports, industry spaces, and institutional sites. Asian American Mass Culture articulates a method for reckoning with contemporary culture today. More so, it articulates a provocation for assessing the future to come.

The scholars assembled for this cluster begin these conversations by showing Asian American Mass Culture to be at once ambitious in scope and ambivalent in spirit. Timothy Yu muses upon the outcomes that come with Asian American representational access, as the proliferation of Asian American public intellectuals, advocates, and spokespeople across media spheres, from sports to the arts, provides a plentitude of narrative voices that normalize the critical language of Asian American Studies in everyday life. Observing these developments through the commercialization of mainstream markets, Timothy K. August places Asian American Studies in critical dialogue with The Frankfurt School to situate Asian American Mass Culture as a method for tracing contemporary power relations, where the mass market appeal signals a subjection to hegemonic entities, but also an opportunity for rearticulating Asian America from within. Tempting as it might be to perceive Asian Americans' incorporation into an ever widening range of industry spaces as a unique twenty-first-century phenomenon, Leland Tabares argues that the professionalization of Asian Americans today expresses a manufactured outcome of the economic instabilities and ambitions of the postwar nation-state when Asian Americans were racialized as what he calls a "model majority" to legitimize the social division of labor under an expanding set of professional institutional formations, which has only proliferated alongside new modes of capitalism production.

As such, Asian American Mass Culture offers a useful diagnostic for analyzing industry-specific developments while also uncovering strategies for resistance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the publishing industry. Rebecca Kuang examines the commercial success of Asian American novelists, like Celeste Ng, following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic — a period marred by anti-Asian hate crimes — as they face not only heightened scrutiny for supposedly selling out to white readerly market demands but enable new kinds of aesthetic practices and sensibilities to combat such criticisms. Reading genre fiction, specifically a particular subset of Chinese North American fantasy novels, Nancy Carranza examines how the growing popularity of contemporary authors, such as R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao, and S. L. Huang, inspire changes in the publishing industry through their anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal aesthetics. Alexander Chun looks to contemporary streaming superhero narratives, like Invincible, to expose the ambivalences implicit in Asian Americans' increasing representational visibility on screen, demonstrating how the replacement of the sexless, effeminate Asian nerd for the hunky, masculine Asian hero symptomizes a new political project that he calls "model minority militarism," typified by the reformulation of the model minority from student to soldier. Finally, reckoning with the violences that continue to shape Asian American life in our post-pandemic times, where anti-Asianness nestles comfortably with Asian American empowerment, Nayoung Yang finds comfort in the relational bonds that can form through social media, where otherwise niche online communities, including #plantmom, nurture intimate forms of world-making that remind us that we always exist with and alongside each other, wherever we may be.

Asian American Mass Culture is thus a method and a critical praxis for being in the twenty-first century as we remain ever folded into mass culture. It is with this cluster that we hope to inspire new conversations, insights, and contributions for and about the past, the present, and the future of Asian America.

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Leland Tabares (@leland.tabares) is an Assistant Professor of Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies at Colorado College. His research is published in Profession, Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Arizona Quarterly, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, and ASAP/J, among other venues. His book chapter on automation, AI, and the future of work is out in Techno-Orientalism 2.0: New Intersections and Interventions (Rutgers University Press). Currently, he serves on the MLA Delegate Assembly for Professional Issues on Race and Ethnicity in the Profession and is Co-Chair for the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies.

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 Literary 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. Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel (Knopf, 2010), 212. ↩︎
2. Many thanks to Timothy K. August and Leland Tabares for their editorial guidance. See Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021), 1. ↩︎
3. Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Duke University Press, 2019), 104-110. ↩︎
4. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1991): 773-797. ↩︎
5. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (Oxford University Press, 2000); David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans (Duke University Press, 2019); Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020); Summer Kim Lee, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke University Press, 2025), 15-21. ↩︎
6. Rising Against Asian Hate: One Day in March, directed by Titi Yu (PBS, 2022). https://www.pbs.org/video/rising-against-asian-hate-one-day-in-march-hx833d/. ↩︎
7. Hong, Minor Feelings, 155. ↩︎
8. Slaying the Dragon, directed by Deborah Gee (Asian Women United of California, 1988); Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America (Temple University Press, 1997); Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Duke University Press, 2007). ↩︎
9. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press, 2020); Kandice Chuh, "The Promise of Hate," Amerasia Journal, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2024): 325-339. https://doi.org/10.1080/00447471.2025.2594967. ↩︎
10. McKittrick, Dear Science, 4. ↩︎
11. Mary Kuhn, The Garden Politic: Global Plants and Botanical Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (New York University Press, 2023); Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021). ↩︎
12. Sarah D. Wald, "Agriculture and Asian American Literature," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019), 764. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.882. ↩︎
13. Candace Fujikane, "Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'I," Whose Vision? Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'I, eds. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura, special issue of Amerasia Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2000): xv-xxii; Byrd, xxxviii-xxxix; Iko Day, "Settler Colonialism in Asian North American Representation," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎
14. Sayaka Akayama, et al., "Exploration of the Value of Japanese-Style Gardens in Incarceration Camps during World War II: The Case of the Amache, Colorado, U.S.," International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 30, No. 9 (2024): 1068-87. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2024.2369549. ↩︎
15. Suji Kwock Kim, "The Korean Community Garden in Queens." Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 72. ↩︎
16. Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens." In Search of Our Mother's Gardens (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 240. ↩︎
17. Timothy K. August, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), 9. ↩︎
18. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 4. ↩︎
19. Myung Mi Kim, interview by Yedda Morrison, Generosity as Method: An Interview with Myung Mi Kim (Electronic Poetry Center, December 1997). ↩︎
20. Yu, How to Live Safely, 2010. ↩︎
21. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013), 19. ↩︎
22. Yiyun Li, "What Gardening Offered After a Son's Death: Deep in Mourning, I Thought, What If Spring Never Returns?" The New Yorker (October 23, 2023). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/onward-and-upward-in-the-department-of-not-moping. ↩︎
23. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Indiana University Press, 1993); Ien Ang, "Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm," boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 25, No. 3 (1998): 223-242. ↩︎

Past clusters