Bringing Asian German Film Studies into Focus

• Published in: German studies review 2023-02, Vol.46 (1), p.134-136
• Main Author: Fitzpatrick, Zach Ramon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Actors; Anglophones; Asian people; Case studies; Concepts; Diaspora; Feminism; Feminist theory; Film history; Film industry; Film studies; Motion picture directors & producers; Motion pictures; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Racism; Sexuality; Stereotypes
• ISSN: 0149-7952; 2164-8646; 2164-8646
• DOI: 10.1353/gsr.2023.0012

Chunjie Zhang maintains that the new sub-field of Asian German studies "diversifies the paradigm of German national literature in a meaningful way," by challenging Eurocentrism, by expanding beyond canonical writers and thinkers, and by laying bare transnational and transcultural links between Germany and Asia.1 For this project, it was my intention to use an Asian German studies lens to do the same for German film studies. Using theoretical concepts such as Anne Anlin Cheng's ornamentalism and Gayatri Gopinath's queer diaspora, these chapters model what Asian German film studies could entail.3 This project is a multifaceted endeavor of uncovering hidden forms of racism, of reevaluating the work of German auteurs with a more racially conscious perspective, of rejecting a linear sense of representational progress, of expanding understandings of diasporic Asianness beyond the Anglophone sphere, of reading older Asian actors' performances against the grain, and of recognizing Asian actors' and filmmakers' contributions to the past century of the German film industry. Anne Anlin Cheng, "Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman" Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 415–446; Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).