Kent Ono Lecture - Asian Media and Film

Kent Ono Lecture

Kent Ono Professor, Asian American Studies, Media and Cinema Studies, and Communications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1:00 to 2:30 PM Thursday, October 27, 2011 1014 Tisch Non-Essential or De-essentialized Identities A Key Problematic in AsianAmerican Screen Studies Two central concepts concern contemporary research on Asian American media and film: materiality and representation. Stereotype studies dominated early Asian American media and film studies. In response, anti-essentialist and anti-foundational approaches to the study of representation replaced them. The question at the center of this talk is: How can Asian American screen studies both publicize the continuing dearth of Asian American representation and continue to problematize the troubling, continuing racialization of Asian Americans across screens, while simultaneously maintaining the larger theoretical value of de-essentializing identities? Professor Ono studies rhetoric and discourse, media and film, and race, ethnic, and cultural studies. He authored Contemporary Media Culture and the Remnants of a Colonial Past (Peter Lang, 2009); co-authored Asian Americans and the Media with Vincent Pham (Polity, 2009) and Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 with John Sloop (Temple University Press, 2002); edited Asian American Studies after Critical Mass (Blackwell, 2005) and A Companion to Asian American Studies (Blackwell, 2005) and co-edited Critical Rhetorics of Race with Michael Lacy (New York University Press, 2011) and Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek with Taylor Harrison, Sarah Projansky, and Elyce Helford (Westview Press, 1996). He co-edits the book series "Critical Cultural Communication" with Sarah Banet-Weiser at New York University Press and also co-edits the Critical Studies in Media Communication journal with Ronald L. Jackson II. Sponsors for this lecture are Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies Program and the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures.