흑백버디무비와 아시아의 타자화

The Black-and-White America and Racialization of Asia

&nbsp;&nbsp;The United States has recently witnessed old "yellow perilism" reemerging in anti-immigrant sentiment. Neil Gotanda has called this neo-yellow-perilism "Asiatic racialization," a process characterized by "[a] group of related yet distinct ideas - Asiatic unassimilability, the conflation of Asian Americans with Asian citizens, and the perception of Asians as a threat to the American nation." Marginalization of Asian and Asian American people in the United States, however, cannot be reduced to a simple binary opposition between US and Asia; it is rather overdetermined by not only international power relations but also US&quot;s domestic racial relations which have been historically constructed and inevitably connected with other problems such as race, gender and nation.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This essay, therefore, will argue that Asian Americans and Asians have been and are being otherized and marginalized in American society by historically specific black-and-white racial logics of American nation. To do this, this essay will closely look at the narrative structure of American popular culture, especially, Hollywood black-white buddy movies such as Rising Sun (1993) and Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) in terms of what Brian Locke has defined as a figure of "brinkmanship." The figure of brinkmanship--predicated upon a black-and-white binary logic about American nation--is often ideologically employed by the dominant culture as a means of both incorporating African Americans into American nation while controling African Americans&quot; claim for human rights. Yet such a binary logic has a dreadful impact on Asian and Asian American identity. Imagining America as a black-and-white nation requires any figure of an outside enemy threatening the unity of the nation. In many black-white buddie movies, Asian males have been constructed as the paradigmatic other-that against which the black-and-white America can in one way or another imagine its identity. The result is that Asians and Asian Americans have been constructed as eternal aliens in American popular culture.