Asian Americans and Television

This report sheds light on the representation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) on television. We examine broadcast, cable, and digital platform television shows in the 2015–2016 season to measure the number of AAPI series regulars and how they fare in settings, screen time, relationships, stereotypes, and storylines. A total of 242 TV shows and 2052 series regulars are examined. This is a ten-year follow up study to our 2005 and 2006 studies of AAPIs in prime time broadcast television.

Contexts

Representation in media matters–so why is prime time still so white?

In the 21st century, representations of South Asians in American popular television have increased significantly. However, there has been very little critical analysis on the ways in which these characters are created and produced. In this review, I use literature from the sociology of race/ethnicity, immigration, and critical media studies to identify the concept of "(ethnic) characterization." While it may be assumed that these representations are created unconsciously, I suggest that media producers intentionally use particular ethnic characteristics that are identified and discussed in contemporary sociological literature. As a result, I argue that these types of media characterizations are relevant to the discipline of sociology.

This article examines post-network American television’s fraught relationship with race and ethnicity by exploring two recent media ventures focused on South Asian Americans: MTV-Desi and NBC’s Outsourced. Approaching these media ventures as productive failures, we examine how industry workers narrate these failures to trace how the contemporary television industry in the United States imagines racial and ethnic identities. Bringing together interviews with media industry professionals, observations at a media industry convention, and thematic analyses of trade press and news coverage, we argue that both media ventures are symptomatic of nationalist logics that inform the operations of television industry professionals even as they seek to target audiences increasingly embedded in transnational media circuits. Industry professionals’ misreading of South Asian Americans’ position in the racial economies of the United States and changes in patterns of media circulation reveal the challenges confronting the media industry when it comes to issues of race and ethnicity.

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2020

Analysis of visual representations of Mixed Race Asian Americans through the stardom of Merle Oberon

Throughout American history, issues of race and ethnicity have played a significant role in the political and social atmosphere of the US, having an effect not only on human lives, civil rights, and economic processes, but also on cultural zeitgeist. With the commercialization and distribution of television in the mid-20 th century, these issues were reflected in the new medium in various ways. In this course we will look at race and ethnicity as they are depicted on US television: how is whiteness distinguished from other racial categories? How can racial representations display complexities, between stereotypes and realism? We will review the ways in which American television has dealt with racial tensions, examine questions regarding representation, genre, resistance, gender, and more. We will discuss television shows such as Amos and Andy, The Cosby Show, Devious Maids, Insecure, Ramy and the works of scholars of race such as Kristen Warner, Herman Gray, Patricia Hill Collins, Mary Beltran, Aniko Bodroghkozy, and others.

Amerasia Journal, 2016

This essay explores how the televisual genre of the domestic melodrama imagined the introduction of Asian Americans into white suburban televisual communities during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In particular, I look to episodes of The Donna Reed Show and My Three Sons to examine how Asian American-centered plotlines were manifest as both a crisis and celebration of domesticity, in contradistinction to prior media portrayals of “the Asian” as an emasculated man isolated in pathological bachelor societies. My analysis probes us to think about 1) what it means to desire race-based “realism” in popular culture, and 2) the consequences of associating such claims to realism with liberal narratives of progress, futurity, and justice.

This paper explores how television exposure influences White viewers' attitudes toward Asian-Americans. Prior research reveals that the dominant image of Asian-Americans in contemporary television is that of the "model minority." Drawing on cultivation, social identity, and causal attribution theories, this study explores the negative outcomes of the seemingly positive Asian-American model minority stereotype. Path analyses conducted with empirical data from a survey (N = 323) revealed that as compared to light viewers, heavy viewers who internalized television stereotypes reported more stereotypical perceptions of Asian-Americans, greater internal attributions for Asian failures, and more symbolic racist beliefs about Asian-Americans.