Reimagining Asian Diasporic Aesthetics Through the Film Minari: Fostering an Antiracist Humanizing Curriculum

• In Event: Dismantling Colonization: Reclaiming Asian Diaspora Experience as Curriculum Knowledge

Abstract

Based on the film Minari, this study proposes to explore a critical curriculum space where decolonization and settler colonial critique open curriculum to the discourse on Asian diaspora aesthetics as a form of humanizing pedagogy. I contest “colonial miseducation” (Saranillio, 2008, p. 259) by theorizing the complex phenomenological terrain where racializing effect on Asian diasporic bodies reinforces daily phenomenologyn of Asian settler habituation shaped by the nationalist logic of Americanization. Moving beyond cross-cultural exchange or stories of ethnic diversity in liberal multicultural discourse, I seek to reposition Asian Diasporic Experience as entangled epistemic space between Asian immigrant settlement as settler habituation on the one hand, and resistance to colonialism in the curriculum, on the other. Such a complex colonial embodiment makes it necessary to advance an antiracist curriculum and humanizing pedagogies by asking questions: How can decolonization helps to unpack and unsettle anti-Asian racializing affect that functions as a drive to reinforce settler habit? How does Asian diaspora in an unproblematic multi-racial, multicultural frame, support U.S. colonial curriculum? In what ways can ADE in the curriculum be reimagined to foster an aesthetic of resistance, agency, and liberation?
As an Asian immigrant settler of color, I position myself to engage in decolonization work by assessing and subverting ongoing dehumanization by the settler colonial, racial capitalist enterprise and making efforts to build an ethical relation with the Indigenous land. Interdisciplinary scholarships of decolonization (Bryd, 2011; Grande, 2004; Rifkin, 2014; Tuck & Gatztambide-Fernandez, 2013), critical phenomenology (Al-Saji, 2014; Fanon, 1952) and Asian settler colonialism (Saranillio, 2013; Day, 2016) guide my study. Saranillio (2008) critique on “colonial miseducation” (p. 259) provides a critical reading on Asian immigrant settlement reinforced by the nationalist logic of Americanization, accompanying “colonial amnesia” that erases settler occupation and native sovereignty. Saranillio (2013), Fujikane & Okamura (2008), and Day (2016) highlights the conflicting epistemic terrain of settler colonial drive that manages racial formations/relations of Asian immigrant /Natives/White settler for advancing White settler supremacy and sovereignty. Al-Saji (2014) and Fanon (1952) see racialization and colonization as constituting perceptual habit/habituation to inform the process of formation of racialized settler habituation. The above literature provides methodological directions to this study for examining, deconstructing, and critiquing colonial logic.
Data in this theoretical research consists of films, media reports, news articles, and academic scholarship. Results show that decolonizing interventions for understanding Asian diasporic aesthetics through the film, Minari reveal a complex epistemic space, and highlights how the trope of Americanization naturalizes the everyday phenomenological experience of racism and colonialism. Results also highlight how the focus on racialized Asian diasporic body in the search for liberation obscures Asian settler inhabituation by submitting to settler colonial logic at the expense of persistent deferral of native sovereignty.

Author

• Michelle S. Bae-Dimitriadis, Pennsylvania State University