Melissa Phruksachart

Melissa Phruksachart (prook-sa-shart) is a scholar of Asian/American media, U.S. film and television, and the broad political and libidinal economies of diversity & multiculturalism. She studies moving image media as an archive of and medium for racial formation, informed by critical race and ethnic studies, women, queer, and trans of color epistemologies, decolonial thought, and the Black radical tradition. Her scholarship and pedagogy insist upon situating media (and media studies) within the spatio-temporal frame of colonial, rather than Euro-American, modernity. 

Her first book (in preparation), Archives of Embarrassment: Making the Asian American Model Minority on Cold War U.S. Television, remediates the “bad objects” of Asian American media history—stereotypes of houseboys, enemies, war brides, and the like. Rather than focusing on the non-existence of Asian American stardom, Archives of Embarrassment centers Asian American background players, actors who never become famous yet had decades-long careers in supporting roles, atmosphere parts, walk-ons, and other sundry acting jobs that produce non-stardom. In looking to television as its archive, the book centers the emergence of the Asian American “model minority” racial form alongside the emergence of U.S. television after WWII. It produces an industrial history of how Asian American actors navigated the entertainment industry—in their on-screen labor and their off-screen negotiations of roles—to illuminate complex and changing notions of race, sexuality, gender, domesticity, and citizenship during the period just prior to the 1965 Immigration Act. 

Her next project, Asian American Media in the Age of Black Lives Matter, investigates how contemporary Black freedom struggles are reshaping Asian American cultural politics. Her most recent article, “The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism,” appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of Film Quarterly.

To read her work, please visit https://umich.academia.edu/MelissaPhruksachart.