Beyond an Asian settler cinema: Asian American media, PBS, and the settler colonial state by Carson Wang, p. 1

Beyond an Asian settler cinema:
Asian American media, PBS, and the settler colonial state

The history of Asian American media is inseparably intertwined with that of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the state-supported public broadcaster in the United States. Asian American media emerged as a grassroots movement that forged a style of social justice media on PBS that was usually understood as nothing if not “noble and uplifting and boring as hell” (Okada, 2015, p. 27). But far from being another dutiful, if sometimes bland, section of social justice media, I argue that Asian American media on PBS is more accurately understood as a settler colonial media movement, making claims to stolen land and citizenship within a settler colonial state, thus maintaining that state’s legitimacy.

PBS and Asian American media organizations exist in a sometimes-contentious symbiosis where PBS pushes a nationalist version of multiculturalism while Asian American media makers and organizations rely on PBS for funding and distribution, each helping guide the other’s direction. Conceptualizing Asian American media as settler colonial reveals the colonial politics motivating pervasive narrative, formal, and ideological conventions that appear neutral on their face. Films within the movement embrace multiculturalism to justify their demands for equality and redress for Asian Americans. However, multiculturalism, a statist model of pluralism, marginalizes indigenous peoples’ demands for sovereignty.

Such an embrace has been a condition of funding from PBS, which included advancing multiculturalism in its founding mandate. While Asian American media makers, frustrated by institutional timidity and conservativism, banded together to expand the limits of what could be included in this kind of state-sanctioned anti-racism, they ultimately collaborated with PBS’s multicultural nationalism to ensure reliable funding and distribution. In a well-meaning pursuit of racial justice, their work within PBS has perfected the state machine instead of smashing it. Inscribed in Asian American media and politics is a persistent settler colonial nationalism that undercuts radical decolonial critiques. Furthermore, attempts by some Asian American filmmakers on PBS to decisively disentangle their work from settler colonial nationalism only reveal the incapacity of the Asian American media movement's greatest patron to sustain such critiques. After a brief historical and conceptual overview, I will discuss three case studies that illustrate settler colonial rhetoric and aesthetics as a fundamental part of the political and formal approach of Asian American media on PBS. The three examples are drawn from three different genres and periods of Asian American media history so that the very structures undergirding Asian American media in general are clearly implicated.

Jun Okada (2015) traces the development of a symbiotic relationship between PBS and Asian American media from their beginnings. PBS was created as a non-commercial home for multiculturalism in the media after a 1967 report, Public Television: A Program for Action, decried the lack of diversity on television, and the first organized groups of Asian American filmmakers would create the content to realize that mission. In her early periodization of Asian American media history, Renee Tajima (1991) places PBS at the center of the movement’s development from an early phase of “urgent, idealistic” community filmmaking to a mature, commercially viable cinema of “institutionalization, pragmatism, and skills attainment”—owing to reliable funding and mass audience distribution from PBS (p. 14). Asian American filmmakers have, in turn, gone beyond content production to structurally shape PBS’s development, forming organizations like the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA, later renamed CAAM) and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) to lobby for PBS to stand by its original multicultural vision and increase funding for films by people of color (Okada, 2015). But that vision did not derive from seeking multiculturalism for its own sake, or from benevolence or humanitarian concern. It was formulated as part of a nationalist project, instrumentalized as a means to the overarching end of developing and maintaining a stable nation-state. Okada (2015) points out the language in A Program for Action that subsumes PBS’s goals within nationalism:

“[P]ublic television should ‘help us see America whole, in all its diversity.’ It should be a ‘mirror of the American style’ and ‘should remind us of our heritage and enliven our traditions.’ . . . Its programs ‘should help us know what it is to be many in one, to have growing maturity in our sense of ourselves as a people.’ It should, in short, be the ‘clearest expression of American diversity, and of excellence within diversity.’” (p. 1)

This language conflates a desired United States and its reality. That is, claiming diversity as fundamental to “the American style” contradicts the history of racism and persistent nativist definitions of “American.” Asian American media on PBS thus does the work of re-imagining the nation as multicultural, producing the cultural products through which, as Benedict Anderson (2006) suggests, the nation-state is constructed as an imaginary community. But as Okada (2015) has argued, this re-imagining remains in strict subservience to the state, either providing “positive images” of Asians living harmoniously under the state or airing grievances for the state to fix by instituting broader multiculturalism (p. 8).

At first glance, this multicultural formulation of the nation-state seems to be an enlightened version of Anderson’s principle of nations being necessarily exclusionary, or even an exception to it. Multiculturalism stands for pluralism, anti-racism, and an expansive diversity. The United States, however, is not just a nation-state, but a settler colonial state. In the U.S. imaginary, an exclusionary limitation persists in the denial of indigenous sovereignty over American land, replacing indigenous heritage and traditions with “our heritage” and “our traditions.” Mahmood Mamdani (2015) has made it clear that the distinctions between conventional colonialism/racism and settler colonialism allow the latter to live on regardless of the vitality of the former:

“The thrust of American struggles have been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler state” (p. 607).

In fact, state-led deracialization—as in PBS—ideologically empowers settler colonialism, demoting indigenous peoples’ exceptional claim to sovereignty to that of only one of many cultural groups who hold equal rights to land and citizenship. In this case, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and all the other indigenous groups whose lands are occupied by the United States became represented on PBS as just one “historically established minority group” within the PBS Minority Consortia of five state-funded content producers, including NAATA (Okada, 2002, para. 4). The Minority Consortia manifested what Lorenzo Veracini (2011) has called “incorporation by recognition” that “primarily promotes the domestication of indigenous sovereignties for the benefit of the settler state” (p. 8).

In its drive towards institutionalization, pragmatism, and skills attainment, Asian American media on PBS has played its part in advancing multiculturalism and the vitality of the settler colonial state, inviting more non-native groups to see themselves as true Americans. For instance, Ancestors in the Americas (2001), a documentary directed by NAATA and ITVS founder Loni Ding, opens with its central question, “Who can claim America?” with the rest of the film making a case for Asian Americans to be able to make that claim with authoritative pride (2:00). Haunani-Kay Trask (2008/2000) issues a scathing rebuttal that points out the settler colonial logic in such pride:

“national identification as ‘American’ is national identification as a colonizer, someone who benefits from stolen Native lands and the genocide so well documented against America’s Native peoples” (p. 61).

For Trask, immigrants are settlers, too.

In what follows, I present three case studies. I consider Ancestors in the Americas as an example of settler colonial aesthetics, analyzing how it mobilizes film form and an aesthetic of hardship to narrate the neutralization and legitimization of settler identity at the heart of classic Asian American texts, such as Gary Okihiro’s Margins and Mainstreams. I then turn to an episode of the PBS show The Great American Recipe (PBS/VPM, 2023) to discuss settler colonial aesthetics’ persistence and entrenchment in modern-day PBS. I finally offer Terminal USA (dir. Jon Moritsugu, 1994) as an example of an attempt for an alternative to multiculturalism, embracing a bottom-up, polycutural model of pluralism. Its harsh reception indicates the inability for PBS to withstand a rebuke of its nationalist mission.

Ancestors in the Americas

The two-part documentary Ancestors in the Americas follows the revisionist historiography of Gary Okihiro (2014/1994), an interviewee and advisor for the film. His seminal book Margins and Mainstreams situates the history of Asian American immigration within a broader history of colonialism in Asia. It traces Asia in the Western consciousness, arguing that Western colonialism has been yearning to dominate Asia even before Columbus set sail hoping to land there and framing the colonization of American Indians as a consequence of the West’s fascination with Asia. For Okihiro, Asia and its people have always been of fundamental importance to the United States and its history. He emphasizes that Asian Americans should not need to justify their presence within it, rejecting the view of Asian Americans as guests in a foreign land:

“Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to America; Americans went to Asia. . . . Asians, it must be remembered, did not come to conquer and colonize America; Americans went to conquer and colonize Asia. And the matter of the ‘when and where’ of Asian American history is located therein, in Europe’s eastward and westward thrusts, engendered, transformative, expansive.” (pp. 28–29)

Connections between the histories of Asians and the settlement of the Americas draw out a “resemblance” (Okihiro, 2014/1994, p. 20) between the oppression of Asians and American Indians. But placing both groups’ experience under the one conceptualization of colonialism neglects their oppression’s specific nature. Just because Asians and American Indians suffered under the same oppressor does not mean they were oppressed in the same way. While Asia experienced the devastation of conventional colonialism, the indigenous peoples of U.S.-occupied territory suffer settler colonialism. While both kinds of colonialism are unquestionably detrimental structures that continue to shape power and its use, as Veracini (2011) points out,

“colonialism and settler colonialism are not merely different, they are in some ways antithetical formations.” (p. 3)

While conventional colonialism seeks to exploit labor and resources, settler colonialism seeks the permanent extirpation of a people from their land and their integration into the metropole. In removing the distinction between conventional and settler colonialism, the unique positionality and struggles of American Indians and other indigenous groups become subsumed into an Asian American framework.

Ancestors in the Americas converts Okihiro’s thesis to audiovisual form using a montage sequence beginning at 8:35 in Part 1. The sequence opens with a handheld shot pointed towards the sky, whirling around before settling on a canted framing of a Gothic, i.e. clearly Western, church bell tower paired with the sound of dissonant, chaotic church bells. Around two seconds into the roughly five-second shot, Okihiro’s voiceover explaining the Catholic church’s role in early colonialism joins these bells; both soundtrack elements construct a sound bridge joining the shot into another handheld, canted shot, now showing the entire facade of the church from a wider shot scale and canted in the opposite direction as the previous shot. This shot lasts for only four seconds before a dissolve and sound bridge to a third shot, now of archival material depicting a member of the Catholic clergy looking towards the right of the screen with hands in prayer. The bells form a sound bridge over a fade to a shot of Okihiro being interviewed. Within a few seconds, this shot dissolves amidst a sound bridge of Okihiro’s voice to a shot of a person looking away from the viewer and towards the left of the frame, where a mountain rises above a blanket of mist. Although it is not explicitly mentioned that this person is indigenous, the context, music, and editing evince that they represent and stand in for the indigenous people of the Americas. Fluttering flute music associated with some indigenous cultures of the Americas begins just before Okihiro says the words “indigenous people.” The following shot, of a farmer driving an ox and plow through an alpine field, uses the Kuleshov effect to give the viewer the impression that the indigenous person was staring wistfully at their land which is now being exploited for agriculture. The farmer, ox, and plow move from the left, back of the screen towards the right side and closer to the camera, opposing the indigenous person’s gaze, an opposition accentuated by the previous shot panning from the indigenous person to the mountain they are staring at, right to left. The plowing dissolves to an archival colonial map of the Americas which zooms in as Sab Shimono, playing the part of an imaginary Asian American ancestor, begins a voiceover that asks, “Why did we come to America? Look not to Asia for the reason. Look to the West.” Midway through this voiceover, the map dissolves to a shot of moving water, combined with rushing water sounds, which then dissolves to a yellow-tinted shot of an Asian immigrant, their identity clearly communicated by their straw hat, looking, like the indigenous person, away from the viewer and towards the left of the frame.




Eyeline matches creating dialectical oppositions between symbols of the West/colonization and stand-ins for indigenous people and Asian immigrantsccc

The editing and mise-en-scene of this sequence articulates an analysis of colonial political economy within forty seconds. Specifically, eyeline matches create dialectical oppositions and solidarities: the clergy and the farmer look to the right while the indigenous person and the Asian immigrant look to the left. And, with a gaze away from the viewer, they look towards the land they will lose, in the former case, and toil in, in the latter case. Significantly, most maps represent west on the left and east on the right. Here, the clergy and the farmer look from the West towards the East, and the indigenous person and Asian immigrant look from the East towards the West. Besides providing a dichotomy of Western colonizer and Eastern colonized, the indigenous person and Asian immigrant do this with their backs turned to the camera; their lack of expression provides the fertile ground for grafting feelings of trepidation onto them through the Kuleshov effect. Sound also contributes, creating a contrast between the cacophonous church bells, perhaps hinting at the violence of Western colonialism alongside the clashing church shots, and the serene flute sounds that are shared by both Native and Asian immigrant subjects. If we look at this sequence as a miniature version of colonial political economy, its sounds and images advance a conflation of the experiences of Native peoples and Asian Americans, and any distinction between settler and conventional colonialism is elided.

The anti-racist project of Margins and Mainstreams extends beyond connecting Asian Americans and American Indians; it also envisions African Americans and other people of color as “kindred people” to Asian Americans (Okihiro, 2014/1994, p. 34). While such a sentiment is a necessary and crucial intervention against anti-blackness among Asian Americans, the mechanism used to achieve it remains stubbornly tied to Asian settlers’ participation in the settler colonial state. Okihiro sees the grounds for solidarity as one of a shared history of being “forged in the fire of white supremacy and struggle” (p. 34). The permanence of Asian settlement is thus championed as proof that Asian Americans’ persistence against racism bettered the United States:

“Asians resisted their exclusion and marginalization and thereby enlarged the range and deepened the meaning of American democracy.” (p. 156)

This idea is echoed in the structure of the first part of Ancestors in the Americas, subtitled Coolies, Sailors and Settlers to reflect the narrative progression from ruthlessly oppressed migrant laborers to “brave [Asians who] survived, took root, and made a home” (47:10). Permanent settlement stands as a culmination, the achievement of becoming American after so much hardship, and a happy ending to Part 1. The second part further celebrates the ways Asians helped build the U.S. state, from illustrious careers in the military to opening new land to farming. As one interviewee puts it, “California’s economic development in the 19th century could not have been accomplished without the Chinese” (101:45). Retooling Okihiro’s words, another interviewee lauds Asian Americans’ upholding and expanding “the promise of the American dream” (118:30).

In writing on Asian settler colonialism in Hawai’i, Candace Fujikane (2008) responds to Okihiro in particular and the rhetoric of American democracy in general:

“[T]he violence of American colonialism is ideologically transformed into ‘democracy,’ masking the realities of a settler colony that continues to deny Native peoples their rights to their lands and resources. . . . [Okihiro’s] affirmation of U.S. democracy actually serves the ends of the United States as a settler state and its occupation of Native lands.” (p. 3)

Fujikane offers the potent example of Hawai’i, where Asian Americans have become the largest racial group and won political representation after struggling against racist regimes. Newly empowered Asian Hawaiian leaders have refused Native Hawaiian demands for sovereignty and political power, used the legal system to strip away Native Hawaiian land, and co-opted Native identity even as Native Hawaiians suffer high levels of poverty. The island’s history provides another example of how the settler colonial state has continued under multiculturalism—only the settlers in charge have changed race (Fujikane, 2008). Solidarity, in other words, is not a natural corollary of history. It must work in a deeper way than pointing out similarities and inserting indigenous struggle into an Asian American framework. Fujikane speaks to this point:

“[There are] dangers of settlers who see themselves as ‘helping’ Hawaiians by attempting to direct the sovereignty process or ‘advising’ Native peoples how they should conduct their struggles. . . . If settler scholars and activists seek to support [Native peoples] in their political struggles, settlers must stand behind Natives.” (Fujikane, 2008, p. 30)

Indeed, Ancestors in the Americas features Asian American scholars discussing settler colonial history and invoking the sound and image of indigenous people without any indigenous scholars, activists, or voices speaking for themselves.


The Asian sojourner struggles up a hill.

Struggle impels narratives of achievement through struggle, so Ancestors in the Americas dedicates significant formal energy to depicting the horrifying suffering historically endured by Asian Americans. Symbolic motifs and affective imagery establish Asian Americans as downtrodden, earning their right to be American through hardship. Two such visual motifs depict an Asian sojourner and moving water. The Asian sojourner first appears early in the film, at 4:43, in a canted shot of an Asian man in Chinese dress climbing dirt stairs. Representing the collective experiences of many Asian American ancestors, the voiceover declares, “I am voyaging still,” as the man lumbers up the steps. Here the synecdoche is accentuated by obscuring the character’s facial features with a hat. The canted angle makes the steps appear almost impossibly steep, and slow motion makes their length laborious. Rhythmic noises of dirt crunching while stepped on and gusts of wind fill an otherwise barren soundtrack with the shot’s color draining away to black and white; the entire audiovisual ensemble stresses difficulty and displeasure. This shot is then repeated in Part 2, when a similarly dressed character returns, now with individualized facial features but still in black and white.

Canting and slow motion also shape the presentation of the water motif, with one formally complex shot at 9:25 repeating multiple times, such as at 37:25. The shot’s visual track shows frothy whitewater disturbed by an Asian immigrant’s boat; that it is from an immigrant’s boat is confirmed by the following shot of the boat’s deck. A shaking handheld camera mirrors and complements the turbulence of the water, which fills the screen through the canted angle. Sounds of rushing water complete the symbolic depiction of the migrant’s strenuous journey. This is but one of the many shots of water throughout the film.


Turbulent water and a shaking camera, a sense of the perilous journey faced by the Asian immigrant

Moving water at other points in Ancestors in the Americas

Those that do not repeat a previous figuration still rhyme with each other; the water is always moving, and many shots use slow motion. Some show waves crashing onto a coast; others have the camera gliding atop open water which fills the frame. The many ways water is filmed place emphasis on the enormous lengths Asian migrants traveled.

Some scenes use pathos-infused imagery to elicit sympathy both for those that suffered and for the need for redress. One scene beginning at 44:06 edits together shots portraying suffering and grueling labor: muddy feet, a black and white and slow motion shot of laborers walking down a road in the rain, another black and white and slow motion shot of a line of laborers, and a freeze frame on a grimacing child clutching metal bars.



Images of toil and Kuleshov effect-like implied despair from China that narrate testimonies of coolie labor conditions.

Although these shots were filmed in South China, thousands of miles away from the atrocities the scene narrates, they read as reenactments since they are matched with a voiceover describing early Chinese Americans’ testimonies of inhumane working conditions. Divorced from the images’ subjects, these people’s aesthetic representation is used for its emotional effect.

The earlier dialectic linking Asian Americans and American Indians against colonizers persists: an illustration of a stern-looking white foreman holding a crop precedes the image of muddy feet, and every shot of workers mentioned above shows their backs turned to the camera, rhyming with the poses of the indigenous person and Asian immigrant. Choices of archival footage also prolong that dialectic through pathos. A montage at 11:35 offers a parade of photos of grinning, well-dressed white men, panning through each of their faces, before fading to the same kind of pan through a photo of Asian workers, again with their backs turned to the viewer, bent down harvesting sugarcane.


Dialectical contradiction between white rulers in close-up and Asian laborers in wide and with backs turned to the camera.

Once again, an eloquent and forceful response to the elisions in this kind of representation comes from Fujikane (2008), who rejects the instrumentalization of hardship as navel-gazing politics:

“Honoring the struggles of those who came before us, however, also means resisting the impulse to claim only their histories of oppression and resistance. . . . The early Asian settlers were both active agents in the making of their own histories and unwitting recruits swept into the service of empire. As we are inspired by our family histories of struggle, we also recognize that the suffering of those who came before us does not change the fact that they entered into a settler colony. . .” (p. 7)