Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown.

For Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema’s radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha’s experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.

In Ghostlife of Third Cinema, Glen M. Mimura confronts the ongoing erasure of Asian American independent media and illuminates its cultural and political significance today.