What is Asian American Cinema, anyway?" The question came from a colleague in the discussion group that had formed to discuss a film and video series I had programmed for the Institute for Cinema and Culture at the University of Iowa, and the question was directed at me. "What are you going to say in your article," asked the filmmakers who knew I was attempting to answer this question. "How are you defining Asian American Cinema?," asked my friends on other campuses, themselves struggling to answer the same question. "I don't know," I replied. "The only thing I do know is that my students are helping me to redefine 'Asian American Cinema' every week, and I'm sure that any answer I give today I will abandon before the end of the semester."

The term 'Asian American Cinema,' which includes works in video and film, implies first of all that there is such a thing as Asian American Culture. But is there such a thing as a unified Asian American Culture? Of course, the term culture is itself a slippery one - is there such a thing as American Culture, for example? Europeans might say yes; many Americans, especially people of color, would say no.

The first thing we must recognize is the diversity of the cultures of Asia. A survey of the many languages spoken in Asia should make that point manifestly obvious. Even within the country of China, there are several distinct ethnicities and hundreds of different dialects; Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all live in very different cultures from each other. Furthermore, political conflicts and historical enmities further divide the various Asian nations; for example, the legacy of Japanese imperialism continues to anger many Koreans. Put simply, the label 'Asian' is not used in Asia - it is only used in the West.

Even in the West, the term means different things to different people. In England, Asian means Pakistani and/or Indian - what Americans call 'South Asians.' By contrast, in the U.S. Asian often means 'East Asian' - Chinese, Japanese, Korean - and 'Southeast Asian' - Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai - as well as referring to the Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago. 'Asian' does not refer to Australia, or to the 'eastern' republics of the former Soviet Union. For most people, 'Asian' is simply a nicer term than the derogatory 'Oriental.'

When people from these disparate cultures arrived in the U.S., they did not automatically bond with each other. Indeed, plantation owners in Hawaii took advantage of the linguistic differences and historical enmities between Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Filipinos, playing the groups against each other, confident that they would not organize collectively. It took a generation or two of children born in the U.S., who shared the English language and recognized that racism treated them all as 'Orientals' despite their differences, to come together as Asian Americans, and even then this odd coalition was unsure whether to define itself racially or culturally. Ideally, the 'Asian American' banner connotes solidarity while denoting diversity.

In that sense, 'Asian American' is not a cultural term at all, nor even an ethnic label, but rather the name of a coalition of Americans who have come to realize that their political situation - determined in part by how Asians are seen by outsiders - requires them to act together. Thus, when the men who killed Vincent Chin in 1982 were let off with a fine and probation but no jail time, Chinese Americans were joined in protest and action by other Asian Americans, who realized that the lenient sentence threatened not just Chinese Americans but all Asians.

Not only is the term 'Asian American Culture' oxymoronic, ethnically- specific terms like Korean American are not necessarily more valid, at least not if we focus on cultural traditions established since arriving in the U.S. Have Korean Americans who have arrived since the Seventies found a place in American culture akin to that of the Korean immigrants who worked the sugar cane fields in the early part of this century? As Judi Nihei, the Artistic Director for the Seattle-based Northwest Asian American Theatre, notes, it might have been possible once to talk about Japanese American Culture, "because the period of immigration is basically limited. The generations are well defined, and they stopped. I mean, from World War II until the Japanese corporations started moving to America in the Seventies, there was no additional Japanese immigration. So Japanese American culture is probably pretty specific, it hasn't been confused with any new immigrant cultures. On the other hand, I'd say there are maybe three or four Chinese American cultures [since Chinese immigration is more difficult to label in terms of historical patterns]."

Attempting to label Asian American movies ethnically thus opens a door which becomes impossible to close: if we draw a distinction between Japanese American and Chinese American Cinema, don't we also have to make distinctions between New York and San Francisco Chinese Americans, between pre- and post-Communist China immigrants, between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers? And while an informed audience might seek out, for example, movies about urban Japanese Americans while ignoring movies about Japanese American farm workers, what are the chances of defining Japanese American Cinema in such specific terms? After all, in the media marketplace, such a film is more likely to be described as 'Asian American,' since that term describes a larger target audience. The confusion between films of particular interest to the Asian American market and Asian American films is profound, politically, in mass media.

So in an important sense this discussion is moot. Perhaps it does not matter whether 'Asian American Cinema' makes any political or esthetic sense - after all, the term has currency in the cinematic marketplace, as evidenced by the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, the Seattle Asian American Film Festival, the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film & Video Festival, and New York's Asian American International Film Festival.

Although the appellation of 'Asian American Cinema' may be a fair accompli, many Asian American filmmakers are not happy with the ways that some of these festivals organize their screenings. Of the New York Festival, Curtis Choy complains, "Asian American International? What's that? It just means Asian movies get lumped in with the Asian American stuff." Mainstream media critics also lump Asian American media with the product from Asia: Time magazine's Richard Corliss, in an article entitled "Pacific Overtures," conflated Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine, Oliver Stone's Heaven and Earth, the videos for Madonna's Rain and Janet Jackson's If, and Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet as examples of "Asian chic." "That's not a valid expression of our media-making heritage or society," says Abe Ferrer, a filmmaker and festival programmer.

Notes Spencer Nakasako (Life is Cheap...but Toilet Paper is Expensive), "Anything Asian, anything that comes from Asia, is considered Asian American film: critics say it's a boon for Asian American filmmakers. You've got the Zhang Yimous and the Chen Kaiges and John Woo's Hard Target [written of] as Asian American Cinema. It just takes one Asian actor or director, and it gets classed as Asian American Cinema. You don't see films out of Africa called African American, you don't see Luis Bunuel called a Mexican American filmmaker."

Even when the label is 'correctly' applied to films made by Asian Americans, that label often becomes all that a media critic can see. Filmmaker Hyun Mi Oh notes, "The discussion of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet focused purely upon the content of the work. Whereas the way Quentin Tarantino's films have been analyzed always stresses his individuality and his style, the way he uses generic conventions, his own specific signature." Similarly, Roddy Bogawa (Some Divine Wind) has noted that no one commented on the strong Warhol influence in his work - at least, not until he made If Andy Warhol's Super-8 Camera Could Talk? in 1994.

Finally, however, it cannot be denied that the market for Asian American Cinema - limited though it is - does enable some films to be made. Hyun Mi Oh notes, "For makers, one of the most valuable things about the term Asian American Cinema is it gives you the tools - the actual apparatus - so you can actually make things, and it wouldn't be possible otherwise. I am glad that there are Asian American forums to exhibit in, grants slated for Asian Americans, it's of practical use to me. If those institutions didn't exist I couldn't fund some of my projects, I couldn't show some of my projects - but it's still imposed from the outside, it doesn't arise naturally from the material itself."

So in a sense there is a market for Asian American Cinema - the problem is, it's a market that looks for Asian faces and looks no further. A more precise definition of Asian American Cinema will not take hold until a significant and vocal number of film critics, festival programmers, filmmakers, and audience members agree that there are some movies which are Asian American - and some movies which are not. As Choy and Nakasako point out, a logical place to start would be to exclude movies made in Asia, especially movies which do not deal at all with life in America.

In 1992 a collection of essays entitled Reading the Literatures of Asian America was published. Editors Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling included essays about Canadian authors, thus suggesting that 'Asian America' included Canada. In this article, I have included a group of Toronto-based filmmakers in the discussion, and I therefore run the risk of effacing whatever it is that makes their films Canadian. Including the work of Helen Lee, Richard Fung, Midi Onodera, and others in this discussion raises the question, "What is America, anyway?"

The relationship between Asian American and Asian Canadian esthetic practices animates much of Helen Lee's work as a critic, curator, and filmmaker. Lee lists both Canada and the U.S. as countries of origin for My Niagara; the film was shot primarily in Toronto, but postproduction took place in New York as well, when Lee worked for Women Make Movies and attended New York University. My Niagara does not set out to define how Asian Canadians are different from Asian Americans; nor does it argue for conflation (while some spectators will surely recognize some Toronto landmarks, Lee's film leaves open the possibility that her protagonist might be read as either Asian American or Asian Canadian). Similarly, Lee's earlier film, Sally's Beauty Spot, highlights the fluidity of representation within the Asian diaspora, juxtaposing Korean Canadian Sally (Lee's sister) with 'Eurasian' (Chinese-English - actually Scottish) Nancy Kwan's famous portrayal of Suzie Wong, the Hong Kong hooker-with- heart. What are we to make of a film which draws on icons of Asian femininity which cross ethnic and national boundaries - is it an example of how all English-speaking Asians are somehow 'American'? Does the cultural dominance of the U.S. completely efface cultural borders, media and otherwise? Lee herself suggests that the situation is either "an embodiment of Asian diasporic esthetics," or "an exercise in dominant cultural politics - if you can ever call 'Asian American' dominant."

This careful attention to the ethnic and national identity of video and filmmakers suggests that 'identity politics' and auteur-based film criticism have joined forces. But where is it written that Asian Americans can make films only about Asian Americans - after all, filmmaker Wayne Wang made the film Slamdance, and James Wong Howe directed Go, Man, Go!, a 1954 movie about the Harlem Globetrotters. And yet, the filmmakers and critics that I spoke with returned to the nebulous concept of "Asian American issues" to define Asian American Cinema with astonishing regularity, even while expressing their uncertainty about such definitions. This problem was so familiar to everyone concerned that I used shorthand to refer to it - I called it "The Gregg Araki question" - and everyone knew that I was asking, "If an Asian American filmmaker makes a movie which doesn't engage with Asian American issues, would you include it in your definition of Asian American Cinema?"

The responses were revealing. Abe Ferrer noted that filmmakers like Araki (probably best known for The Living End) and Roddy Bogawa "expand the definition of what our community is all about by incorporating the notion that we're not exclusively about cultural recovery, we're not exclusively preoccupied with depicting our heritage through the recurrent themes of immigration, the Internment, [the murder of] Vincent Chin [and the ensuing court cases]; they demonstrate that many of us have other influences that we've grown up with, and examining those influences is a valid addition to the kind of language or subject matter that we're embracing." A strict, content-based definition of Asian American Cinema thus runs the risk of defining the cultural experiences of Asian Americans so narrowly as to promote one 'correct' Asian American Experience.

"Even when Araki, or Bogawa, or [Jon] Moritsugu (My Degeneration) aren't dealing with traditional Asian American themes, there's something about their films, their screenplays - something - it doesn't feel like white independent filmmaking," claims Spencer Nakasako. "It's not a question of some 'x-factor' which makes it Asian American, but, for example, you can sense from the characters, from the way people talk to each other - there's some guilt going on, some kind of uniquely sansei [third-generation Japanese American] anger." But while 'sansei attitude' might define a corpus of films made by Asian Americans, 'attitude' in itself does not constitute a 'Cinema.' Many mainstream media critics have labeled films as varied as Reality Bites, Slacker, and Go Fish as 'Generation X' or 'twentysomething' movies -often to the consternation of the filmmakers and their audiences - but that does not mean there is such a thing as 'Generation X Cinema.'

Rather than using the market-based approach to define Asian American Cinema, it might make more sense to refer to modes of production, and, indeed, many filmmakers agree that there was a coherence to Asian American media production in the Seventies that is absent today. Around 1970 a group of Asian Americans in the Los Angeles area raised the banner of 'Visual Communications' - VC for short - and began producing films cooperatively. VC has undergone many transformations, but it maintains a palpable commitment to cultural intervention which shows that the lessons of the Sixties are still with us today. Talk to Abe Ferrer, who's been with VC since 1984, and phrases like "self-determination," "community definition," and "cultural reclamation" reverberate. A sense of 'community' pervades much Asian American media from the same period: the same names recur constantly in film credits in different capacities as filmmakers lent their support to each other's projects. Curtis Choy (The Fall of the I-Hotel) asserts, "We did feel a certain unity, we did support each other verbally and with our hearts. In the early Seventies, what I wanted to do, my dream, was to produce something, anything, it didn't have to be a feature - something that was written, produced, teched, completely controlled by Asians."

Many of the Asian American filmmakers who started out in the Seventies speak of Asian American Cinema in the past tense. There is a difference between Asian American Cinema and the 'Asian American Cinema Movement,' a term which I use to describe the community orientation and the palpable sense of discovery which pervades the Seventies films. For what it's worth, many of the up-and-coming Asian American filmmakers also sense a Great Divide between the Seventies and the Eighties. "For me Asian American Cinema describes a period of film-making rather than an ongoing cultural presence," says Hyun Mi Oh. "The term describes mostly films of a documentary tradition of the Sixties and Seventies - I don't know what I would call what is happening now, to me it doesn't make sense to call it Asian American Cinema."

"If there is such a thing as Asian American Cinema, then it's based on content and theme." Oh's words suggest that definitions of Asian American Cinema inevitably return to larger questions of definition for the Asian American community. Cultural traditions, language differences, and different experiences in the U.S. separate Asian Americans, while a shared sense of political purpose strains to hold Asian Americans together. But given the ethnic diversity of Asian Americans; given the divide between content-based and authorship-based definitions of Asian American Cinema; and given the shifts in modes of production from the Sixties to the Nineties, is it at all possible to speak of a coherent Asian American Cinema?

That of course depends on how you define coherence. The difference between a political movement and a political coalition is in a sense simply a question of contingency, of defining issues which will sustain political solidarity as opposed to issues which promote short-term consensus. Perhaps the Asian American Cinema Movement describes a very specific historical moment, and left us with a mantle which later video and filmmakers have slipped into (some comfortably, some less so). Can we coin a term which links together many divergent forms of cinematic expression while acknowledging their diversity - the plural 'Asian American Cinemas' perhaps? The problem is that this plural term, while acknowledging heterogeneity, still insists on unity even while it allows for dissension - Gregg Araki's films are still considered to be exceptions to the general rule.

Judi Nihei proposes a distinction between Asian American filmmakers - a category based on cultural labels and authorship - and a more specific definition of Asian American Cinema: "Asian American stories through the eyes of Asian American filmmakers. So that there are Asian American filmmakers who are making stories about things besides Asian America, and I don't know that you would classify their work specifically as Asian American Cinema. And there are non-Asian filmmakers making stories about Asian Americans, and I think that you would exclude their films as well. That's a very specific, probably very limited at this point, area of film." If we employ Nihei's framework, then it is the responsibility of festival programmers (for example) to make it known whether they are providing a forum for Asian American media artists, regardless of subject matter, or if they are programming movies about Asian American experiences. It is significant that Nihei insists on a definition which does not oppose authorship and subject matter, but one which assumes that an Asian American perspective ("through the eyes of Asian Americans," as she puts it) should be operative.

Ultimately, those of us who are interested in Asian American Cinema are interested in Asian American perspectives, whether the subject matter is ourselves, American culture more generally, or the whole world of cinematic possibility. As long as Asian Americans continue to question who we are - and when we stop questioning we'll be figuratively and literally dead - there will be no easy answers. And that is how it should be.