Reimagining Asian Diasporic Aesthetics Through the Film Minari: Fostering an Anti-Racist Curriculum

• In Event: Reclaiming and Reimagining Intersectional Asian Diaspora Experiences as a Praxis of Decolonization and Anticolonialism

Abstract

Drawing from scholarship on transcultural, critical phenomenology and anti-racist and settler colonial critique, this study offers critical conversation on diasporic subjectivities and aesthetics in the movie Minari to advance a transcultural discourse for decolonization and anti-racist curriculum theory. The research specifically contests transcultural discourse that reduces hybridity and hybridization as diasporic aesthetic and subjectivities to cross-cultural exchange. Such discourses simplify experience and lack critical examinations of the complex arrays of power and hierarchies within and across settler colonial states, wherein racial, colonial struggles take place. I situate Asian diasporic aesthetics in the phenomenological realm of White supremacist, settler colonial capitalism, in which Asian racialized immigrant bodies and experiences are a process of settler habitation. I do so through a critical discussion of the social and historical implications of the movie Minari by examining how White supremacist, settler colonial curriculum generates racism that racialize the settler habits of Asian immigrant/Asian Americans.

Author

• Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Pennsylvania State University