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"Archives of Embarrassment: Playing Asian on Cold War U.S. Television"
Archives of Embarrassment: Playing Asian on Cold War U.S. Television recasts American television’s network era through the lens of Asian American history and the U.S.’s imperial wars in Asia. It begins by recovering the supporting roles, background parts, walk-ons, and other sundry acting jobs that produce what I call “Asian American non-stardom.” However, instead of critiquing these performances as merely bad objects, I show that these “archives of embarrassment” instructed audiences on the co-incidence of Cold War geopolitics, national affairs like civil rights and immigration, and Los Angeles-area municipal concerns around the building of post-World War II suburbia. Across four chapters, the book also reveals a network of Asian American actors and non-actors who labored in the entertainment industry as casting agents, extras, costumers, restaurateurs, cinematographers, and domestic workers. This ultimately moves us outside the binary of inclusion/exclusion to argue for proximity, adjacency, and entanglement as generative methods for writing the history of Asian Americans in Hollywood.
Melissa Phruksachart is an Assistant Professor of Film, Television, & Media.
