Asian American Cultural Production Via the Internet, L.S. Kim

Event Date: 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 6:30pm

Event Location: 

  • MCC Theater

Among the top 100 YouTube channels, a stunningly high number of YouTube celebrities are not who you might expect them to be: Asian American. What makes on-line environments, both in terms of production and consumption, a distinctly different realm for racial discourse? It is no coincidence that alternative media forms and more directly, counter-hegemonic perspectives, are being created, fed, circulated, grown by performers of color via the Internet. At the same time, how is the border between margin and center not "crossed" but rather dis/integrated by producer-artists who manage their on-line status, forging a different – and successful – system of fandom and stardom? In what ways can on-line self-production enable new terms for race and racial representation?

L.S. Kim is a Visiting Associate Professor from the Department of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. The Department is very pleased to welcome her to our faculty for the Fall 2012 quarter.  Her book, Maid for Television: Race, Class, and Gender on the Small Screen is being published by NYU Press in 2013.