Contemporary Authors

• Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship New York University Press (New York, NY), 2016
• The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media Routledge (New York, NY), 2017

1. Asian American media activism : fighting for cultural citizenship LCCN 2015047144 Type of material Book Personal name Lopez, Lori Kido. Main title Asian American media activism : fighting for cultural citizenship / Lori Kido Lopez. Published/Produced New York : New York University Press, 2016. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm. ISBN 9781479878192 (cl : alk. paper) 9781479866830 (pb) CALL NUMBER P94.5.A752 U656 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The Routledge companion to Asian American media LCCN 2016050422 Type of material Book Main title The Routledge companion to Asian American media / edited by Lori Kido Lopez and Vincent N. Pham. Published/Produced New York : Routledge, 2017. Projected pub date 1704 Description pages cm ISBN 9781138846012 (hardback)

• Lori Kido Lopez - https://lorikidolopez.wordpress.com/

  Lori Kido Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Communication Arts department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also affiliate faculty in the Asian American Studies Program and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

  Dr. Lopez is the author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship with NYU Press and a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media with Vincent Pham. Her work examines race and ethnicity in the media through a feminist/cultural studies lens. She is particularly interested in examining the way that Asian Americans and other minority groups use media in the fight for social justice. Her newest research examines Hmong Americans and the culturally specific ways that they are participating in the production and consumption of digital media, particularly considering the gendered dimensions of Hmong media cultures.

  Lori received a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California, an MA in Mass Communication from Indiana University, and a BA in Asian Studies and Media Studies from Pomona College.

• University of Wisconsin--Madison - https://commarts.wisc.edu/people/lklopez

  Lori Lopez
  Lori Lopez's picture
  Assistant Professor
  Media and Cultural Studies
  6134 Vilas Hall
  608-265-0069
  lklopez@wisc.edu
  Office Hours:
  Tuesday 1 - 2 PM
  Thursday 11 AM - 12 PM
  Expertise and Activities:
  My research examines the way that minority groups such as women, racial minorities, and queer communities use media in the fight for social justice. I am interested in struggles to improve the representation of disenfranchised groups within mainstream media, as well as the different ways that grassroots/activist media, digital media, and consumer culture all can play a role in transforming identities and communities. My book Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship (2016, NYU Press) examines the efforts of Asian Americans to impact the way that their community has been represented. Using ethnography, interviews, and archival research, it examines the work of traditional activists who have worked since the 1960s to protest and reform imagery, but also contextualizes the kinds of media activism undertaken by advertising agencies, fans, YouTube artists, and bloggers. In my work I am dedicated to the blending of scholarship and activism, and highly value collaborations between community organizations and academics. My newest research examines Hmong Americans and the culturally specific ways that they are participating in the production and consumption of digital media, particularly considering the gendered dimensions of Hmong media cultures.

  Education
  Ph.D. University of Southern California,
  M.A. Indiana University,
  B.A. Pomona College,
  Honors/Awards
  Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellowship , University of Wisconsin-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities , 2016
  Outstanding Women of Color Award , University of Wisconsin-Madison , 2015
  Research-Service Grant , University of Wisconsin-Madison , 2017
  Early Career Achievement Award , Association for Asian American Studies , 2017
  Articles
  2016. "Always On the Phone: The Invisible Role of Hmong Women in Diasporic Media Industries." Communication, Culture and Critique , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/ptqkaq413bh6e2kspsvcxanh8uq2z3mm.pdf .
  2016. "Mobile Phones as Participatory Radio: Developing Hmong Mass Communication in the Digital Age." International Journal of Communication , 10, 2038-2055 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/my57avlbfwzzjog3e5nxpsw9xx1ntydg.pdf .
  2015. "A media campaign for ourselves: building organizational media capacity through participatory action research." Journal of Media Practice , 16 (3): 228-244 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/69a2ejj649vquoh570fagotwhxijqwy7.pdf .
  2014. "Blogging While Angry: The Sustainability of Emotional Labor in the Asian American Blogosphere." Media, Culture and Society , 36 (4) , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/x0d9w1xokor669nctp3b.pdf .
  2012. "Fan-Activists and the Politics of Race in The Last Airbender." International Journal of Cultural Studies , 15(5): 431-445 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/cbdid4v8xsra27a3j02u.pdf .
  2011. "The Yellow Press: Asian American Radicalism and Conflict in Gidra." Journal of Communication Inquiry , 35(3): 235-251 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/cwouykmvnr4nzzmfy1b5.pdf .
  2011. "Eating a Meal with the Other: The Ethical Challenges of Travel Food Shows." Popular Culture Review , 22 (1): 99-107 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/kjn0zhx1mnwnkdwzcyjn.pdf .
  2009. "The Radical Act of Mommy Blogging: Redefining Motherhood through the Blogosphere." New Media and Society , 11(4): 729-747 , https://uwmadison.box.com/shared/static/jjsnarc9rmqjb6qbpl3b.pdf .
  Books
  2016. Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship. New York: NYU Press .
  2017. Routledge Companion to Asian American Media. New York: Routledge .
  Chapters
  2016. "Building Digital Bridges: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Asian American Studies (with Konrad Ng)." The Routledge Handbook of Asian American Studies , Cindy I-Fen Chen Routledge .
  2016. "Asian American Food Blogging as Racial Branding: Rewriting the Search for Authenticity." Global Asian American Popular Cultures , Shilpa Dave, Tasha Oren, and LeiLani Nishime NYU Press .
  2017. "Deploying Oppositional Fandoms: Activists’ Use of Sports Fandom in the Redskins Controversy (with Jason Lopez)." Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World , Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington NYU Press .
  2017. "The Ethics of Visibility: Disability, Race, and the Challenge of Mediated Empowerment." Disability Media Studies: Media, Popular Culture, and the Meanings of Disability , Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick NYU Press .
  Other
  2014. Lopez Creates Vilas Video Camp for Community Youth. https://commarts.wisc.edu/about/news/2014/11/11/lopez-creates-vilas-video-camp-community-youth. .
  2015. Professor Lopez, Outstanding Woman of Color for 2015-16. https://commarts.wisc.edu/about/news/2015/08/26/professor-lopez-outstanding-woman-color-2015-16. .
  2015. Madison’s Asian American Media Spotlight. https://commarts.wisc.edu/about/news/2015/10/06/actorwriter-jacqueline-kim-talks-about-advantageous. .
  2016. Professor Lori Kido Lopez on the Limits of Racebending. https://commarts.wisc.edu/about/news/2016/12/22/professor-lori-kido-lopez-limits-racebending. .
  2017. Professor Lori Kido Lopez to Receive Early Career Achievement Award. https://commarts.wisc.edu/about/news/2017/03/24/professor-lori-kido-lopez-receive-early-career-achievement-award. .
  Courses
  CA 250 - Survey of Contemporary Media
  CA 347 - Race and Ethnicity in the Media
  CA 420 - Asian Americans in the Media
  CA 608 - Gender and Sexuality in the Media
  CA 950 - Race, Racism and Media (grad seminar)
  CA 950 - Feminist Media Studies (grad seminar)

• University of Wisconsin--Madison - http://ls.wisc.edu/news/new-faculty-qa-lori-kido-lopez-communication-arts/

  New faculty Q&A: Lori Kido Lopez (Communication Arts)

  Arts & Humanities
  Back to News

  Assistant Professor Lori Kido Lopez joins the Department of Communication Arts as a freshly-minted PhD from University of Southern California. She’s a runner, a gastronome, and a media expert. Thanks to the generosity of alumnus George Hamel (BA ’80, Communication Arts) and family, Communication Arts — one of the largest departments in the College of Letters & Science — is able to attract faculty like Lopez whose work is on the cutting edge of media and cultural studies.

  Welcome, Lori! Tell us about your research interests.
  I research the way that minority groups, particularly Asian Americans, use media in the fight for social justice.

  What courses will you teach?
  Race/Ethnicity in the Media, Gender/Sexuality in the Media, Asian Americans in the Media.

  What can students expect in your classroom this year?
  We will be discussing and dissecting all sorts of fun things – episodes of Jersey Shore and Teen Mom, stand-up comedy, hip hop culture, President Obama, Tyra Banks. Any aspect of pop culture is fair game in my classroom!

  What are you most looking forward to at UW-Madison?
  I am so excited to be working alongside Michele Hilmes and Jonathan Gray (both professors of media and cultural studies) in my department. I am also thrilled to work with folks in Asian American Studies– programs like this exist thanks to the hard work of community members and activists, and we are lucky to benefit from that history.

  How do you unwind?
  I think about food pretty much all day long, so I get pretty excited around dinner time to put plans into action, cook up a feast. (Most thumbed-books on her shelf? “My Jeffrey Steingarten gastronomical lit.”)

  What’s the best thing you’ve done in Madison so far?
  My husband and I ran in a 5K that ended with beers at the terrace and high fives from Bucky. I was so excited – I am obsessed with Bucky! Also I have already eaten far too much cheese.

• Henry Jenkins - http://henryjenkins.org/2016/09/asian-american-media-activism-and-cultural-citizenship-an-interview-with-lori-kido-lopez-part-one.html

  Asian-American Media Activism and Cultural Citizenship: An Interview with Lori Kido Lopez (Part One)
  September 13, 2016
  I recently announced the line-up of speakers for our Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment conference to be held at USC on October 21 (You can still register here). When we were putting together the conference, one of the first people who I considered was Lori Kido Lopez, a young faculty member in the Communication Arts Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a recent graduate from the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Lopez had been an original member of my Civic Paths research group and her work on the race-bending movement which grew up in protest of the white-casting of the feature film based on The Last Airbender was a key influence on our work around fan activism. She entered that project through her interest in the collaboration between these fans and veteran Asian-American media activists who had for decades been struggling with issues of representational diversity and industry inclusion.

  When I was asked to serve on her dissertation committee, I came to see her work on fan activism in a much larger context, which included everything from struggles over hateful stereotypes and racist jokes, to the efforts of Asian-Americans to use consumer power to put pressure on the advertising industry, to the emergence of YouTube as a space often more receptive to Asian-American performers. And earlier this year, she published her first book, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, which is a first-rate contribution to our understanding of the current and historic struggles around diversity and inclusion in the media.

  Unfortunately, Lopez can't join us for the USC event, having commitments to speak at another conference on the East Coast that same weekend, so I reached out to see if she would be willing to provide me with an interview as part of the lead-up to our conference. We cover a lot of territory in the interview which follows, yet it gives us glimpses into only a few of the richly documented and carefully interpreted case studies that run throughout her book. It is essential reading for anyone who is trying to follow these issues, and there's no question that the struggles over diversity and inclusion are one of the most powerful forces shaping the entertainment industry right now.

  You begin the book with considerations of recent struggles over inclusion and representation within network television, focusing specifically on mixed responses from Asian-American audiences to Fresh Off the Boat and The Mindy Project. Many in the television industry are watching responses to these programs, and others, such as Master of None, closely to see if they can figure out strategies for more diverse and inclusive programing that may nevertheless attract a “broader” audience. What insights would you like to see television executives take from the debates surrounding these and other recent programs?

  Some of my biggest goals for this book are to broaden our view of what should be done to improve representation of Asian Americans in the media, and to explain what makes media activism challenging. At this point, Asian Americans are still lagging far behind other minorities in nearly every area. There are no hour-long shows focusing on Asian American communities, Asian Americans are never nominated for acting awards, and movies routinely whitewash Asian leading roles and leave Asian actors the sidekick roles. I watched the movie Pitch Perfect 2 recently and was not surprised at all to see that Asian cultures were the butt of far too many jokes, and the one Asian American character is a soft-spoken weirdo. But listing problems is the easy part—what’s harder is saying what we want the solution to be.

  We are currently in a moment when we have more Asian American sitcoms than ever before, more Asian Americans in writers rooms and other production roles, more Asian American talent featured across alternative media platforms. Yet we still hear a lot of complaints and contradictory responses coming from Asian Americans. In this book I reveal the different stakeholders and participants engaged in the project of fixing these problems—including volunteer media activists, regulatory and advisory boards, advertisers, YouTubers, fans, and other online participants. Once we recognize who all is working for this cause, we can start to see why their responses end up differing. That’s a pretty diverse group of people, they’re not going to agree about every little detail!

  After explicating all of the different forms of media activism currently being undertaken, I would hope that what emerges for television executives is a clarity and sense of urgency about how dire the problem is and how they should be doing all they can to hire more Asian Americans at every level. They should then feel at peace with the fact that all of the media activists identified here will continue to criticize and ask for more, because they are tapping into a vibrant, long-neglected, politically engaged core of viewers who know better than to be satisfied with any one role, episode, or movie focusing on them—the battle will always continue as long as representations continue to be made, because racism persists and is at the heart of media inequalities and injustices. So I would hope that television executives can be sensitive to how complicated this situation is, while certainly affirming that every step they make in advancing the representations of Asian Americans is vitally important and desperately needed.

  You argue that differences between Asian-American media activists have to do with different models of cultural citizenship. Explain this concept and outline some of the underlying models of cultural citizenship which have shaped debates around these programs.

  We usually think of citizenship in legal terms, focusing on who is legally recognized as a member of a nation. But the idea of who belongs is also deeply cultural, and “cultural citizenship” is the idea that we also feel more or less like we belong within a nation depending on how we are treated, and how our identities and cultural practices are recognized. Asian Americans often are searching for a sense of belonging in the U.S. because they are always seen as outsiders, even though they were born here or lived here most of their lives. I connect this to media activism, because I think that when we are arguing about what kinds of representations we want to see of Asian Americans, we are really saying that we want the media to play a stronger role in contributing to Asian Americans feeling like they are cultural citizens.

  But the concept of Asian American cultural citizenship means different things to different communities, and that causes disagreements even among activists. Some think that if we are cultural citizens then we will be treated “just like everyone else,” not seen as different in any way. Others want to be recognized as a powerful group that deserves attention, particularly in terms of being able to wield economic and spending power. Others want to be able to control their own representations and make media on their own terms, no matter what that might look like. These different views on how cultural citizenship should be realized lead to different strategies when it comes to media activism.

  You make the point in the introduction that a key difference between producers and activist is that activists see representation as a collective issue, whereas most of the mechanisms for thinking about media audiences within the entertainment industry stress individual consumer choices. Can these two perspectives be reconciled? Why or why not?

  One way that the entertainment industry stresses individual consumer choices is through the idea that we have such a diverse range of media available, every individual can pick and choose a media diet that is particularly suited to their tastes. But at a very basic level, discourses of individualism are at odds with the fight for social justice. We have to be able to think beyond ourselves and our own desires in order to identify those who are being systematically disenfranchised, and do something to rectify that inequality at a broader level. This applies to Asian Americans media activists too—they recognize that there is a widespread problem when it comes to representations of Asian Americans, and that we will have to work together in order to combat it. This often comes in two forms: encouraging media industries to cast more Asian Americans, and encouraging audiences to support works that represent Asian Americans well. If this is all there is, then the focus on individuals could be deployed by convincing individual producers it’s in their best interest to shift their casting practices, and convincing individual viewers it’s in their best interest to support Asian American media.

  But one of the things that I work to reveal in the book is that there are a lot more ways we can impact change than just those two things, and there are a lot more people involved in media activism than just media producers and media consumers. For instance, we also need to consider the policies that are encouraging or discouraging media industries to shift their practices, the advertising agencies who work with corporations to identify consumer audiences and their needs, the wide array of producer-consumers who participate in the online arena. Once we expand our view of media activism to include these other sites, it becomes even clearer that media activism needs to take place at the level of the collective, rather than the individual. If we focus too much on the individual, we lose sight of the collective politics that have always animated antiracism on the part of Asian Americans.

  What are some of the factors that led to the earliest forms of Asian-American media advocacy? How do these campaigns relate to the larger history of politics around race and representation in American media, going back to The Birth of a Nation, if not before? To what degree are the issues today the same as they were in the 1970s? What has shifted in terms of the models of change activists deploy to lobby for their cause? What has shifted in the industry’s responses to such campaigns?

  The history of Asian American media advocacy aligns with the rise of the Asian American identity itself. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, different Asian ethnic communities started coming together to protest the routine discrimination they collectively faced. In an act of self-determination, they called themselves “Asian American” (marking “Oriental” as pejorative) and fought racism alongside Black, Chicano, and Native American activists. Issues of representation were always foundational to the Asian American Movement, in relation to both media and theater. In the 1970s we saw the birth of Asian American cinema, with independent filmmakers collectively documenting stories in Asian American communities and screening them at the very first Asian American film festivals. This was also the time when Asian American actors came together to fight against “yellow face” and gain more roles in plays and movies, to resist harmful stereotypes, and to remove the use of slurs like “chink.”

  So we can see that as long as there have been “Asian Americans,” there has been activism surrounding representations and media images. But if we look at the activist strategies deployed in these early days, we can trace a precedent all the way back to the African Americans who protested the racism of Birth of a Nation in 1915. And as you allude to, the general shape of media activism has remained the same since then: activists target the image’s creators, funders, or audiences. Sometimes they can push for legal repercussions. These are the same things that activists do today, largely because the same issues still exist, such as whitewashing, stereotypes, harmful depictions, a failure to hire minorities. But hopefully my book shows the way that even though this exact same form of activism is still around—and plays a vital role in shaping media industries—there are also other forms of media activism available, and we need to recognize those as well.

  Lori Kido Lopez is an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is also affiliate faculty in the Asian American Studies Program and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is the author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship and a co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Asian American Media.

Print Marked Items
Lopez, Lori Kido. Asian American media
activism: fighting for cultural citizenship
A. Dantes
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
54.2 (Oct. 2016): p203.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Lopez, Lori Kido. Asian American media activism: fighting for cultural citizenship. New York University, 2016. 246p
bibl index ISBN 9781479878192 cloth, $89.00; ISBN 9781479866830 pbk, $27.00; ISBN 9781479835942 ebook,
contact publisher for price
(cc)
54-0525
P94
MARC
This is an absolutely remarkable book. It is meticulously researched and very carefully argued. This is the defining
work on Asian American media representation, participation, and cultural citizenship. There hasn't been another work
that so thoroughly explains the intricacies of Asian American identity in relation to media participation and
representation. Lopez (Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison) explores the eponymous idea with interviews, analysis, and
anecdotes. She also explores the history of media activism and its effect on cultural citizenship. Despite the author's
insider status due to her identification as Asian American as well as her participation with activist groups, her book still
provides an objective analysis including some pointed critique of the way that this population works in and through
media to achieve goals. Lopez also tells the history of media activism from its beginnings to its status in new media in
the present day. This book should be a necessary part of Asian American studies curricula for years to come because of
its exhaustive and wholly complete exploration of media activism. Summing Up: **** Essential. Lower-division
undergraduates through faculty.--A. Dantes, independent scholar
Dantes, A.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Dantes, A. "Lopez, Lori Kido. Asian American media activism: fighting for cultural citizenship." CHOICE: Current
Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 203. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479868746&it=r&asid=744972a89ed08dbcd080d9c237397245.
Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479868746

Dantes, A. "Lopez, Lori Kido. Asian American media activism: fighting for cultural citizenship." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2016, p. 203. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479868746&it=r. Accessed 6 Aug. 2017.

• Project Muse
  https://muse.jhu.edu/article/658174
  Word count: 2189

  Reviewed by
  Anthony Yooshin Kim (bio)
  Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship
  by Lori Kido Lopez. New York University Press.
  2016. $27 paper. 272 pages.
  inline graphic With her first book, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Lori Kido Lopez offers a fresh multidisciplinary take for understanding this recurring scenario in the US culture industry: a major network and creative team behind a problematic media production are forced to reckon with the swiftly mobilized opposition of Asian American media activists armed with smartphones and 140 characters. Lopez argues that in such cases, "while the stated goals of media activists might seem immediate—to recast a role, to demand an apology from producers, to hire an Asian American consultant or director, to produce more images of Asian Americans—what goes unstated is the connection between these achievements and the ultimate goal of cultural citizenship for Asian Americans."1 If the full enjoyment of legal citizenship is still burdened by the ongoing contradictions of race and capital, Lopez's attention to cultural politics is indebted to the innovations of earlier Asian American scholarship like Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts (1996) and Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (2004).2 Lopez's intervention, then, is to take seriously the seeming immateriality of an Internet ad, an online video, a hashtag, or a tweet, contending that they do not exist in an information vacuum but must be considered part of the wildly disparate contests and expressions for Asian American belonging in the United States. While the salvo of digitized ephemera takes up more and more space in our hard drives, our cognitive faculties, and our social environments, Lopez does not see our outright submission to neoliberal [End Page 159] technology. Positioned as a scholar and practitioner of media activism, she is able to glean the necessary potential to produce meaningful challenges against "a ubiquitous postracial media discourse that insists upon race as merely an individual quality."3
  The sites Lopez brings together to compose her study are intriguing and unexpected. Diverging from the canonical scholarly genres of literature, theater, and film, she pursues different iterations of media activism as they play out in the underexplored realms of policy, advertising, and rapidly changing social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter—underexplored, she suggests, given the way such highly commercialized and visible institutions are rife with co-optation by capitalist logics and are easily "a target of criticism rather than a site for potential contributions to social justice."4 But in spite of the skepticism of viewing Asian America as a brand name, a target audience, or a consumer public, Lopez does not concede their productive tensions in the work of fashioning cultural citizenship. Transaction, translation, and, to quote one of her interviewees, "transcreation" are also important moments in which meanings of value and (non)equivalence can be ascertained. Lopez suggests that paying attention to these combined social, cultural, and economic exchanges can help us not only critique but also collectively participate in constructing political and representational strategies to transform the terms of the Asian American community from within and without.5
  Beginning with the variegated responses to the flourish of recent Asian American sitcoms like The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012–2015, Hulu, 2015–present) and Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–present), Lopez suggests "that even when images of minority communities succeed in gaining visibility there can be disagreement about what political gains have really been achieved."6 She contends that these "disagreements" over Asian Americans in the media "push back against assumptions that our neoliberal media landscape is inexorably moving toward the individual" and instead interrogates "specific examples of media activism [where] we can more clearly see how activists and minority communities believe that empowerment will be achieved through cultural citizenship."7 In fighting for cultural citizenship, then, Lopez teases out the distinction of "activism" versus "media activism," being careful to "counter a romanticism for a kind of 'authentic' or 'real' activism that is limited in who it can stem from or what kinds of actions and alliances it can include."8 She defines activism as "[beginning] with the identification of a social problem based on inequality, injustice, or harm to society" that leads to "intentional participation in a political act designed to remedy a social injustice."9 Media activism, then, is "the identification of a social problem that exists within the media and the intentional action taken to remedy this mediated problem . . . [depending] on the fact that media activists explicitly connect media [End Page 160] representations to social realities."10 If Lopez suggests that Asian American media activists now "take on the collective political identity that developed . . . from the 1960s but do not share in its radical critiques," one wonders how this internal tension might exist with the pitfalls of what she designates as "a more conservative, assimilationist Asian American politics"?11
  Each of the five chapters can be read as a separate case study into Asian American media activism, but taken cumulatively, they provide a multiple-pronged apparatus for how to enact a committed critical media studies project. In chapter 1, Lopez provides a cultural history of traditional modes of Asian American media activism stemming from the 1960s in Los Angeles, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Anchored by her own three-year involvement as a board member with the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), she assesses the parameters of assimilationist strategies based on a "stereotype analysis" that views all representation through the binary of positive or negative and seeks to depict Asian Americans as being "just like everyone else." She cautions against desires for the normativity of an "unmarked [position] in the same way that white, male, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, or otherwise hegemonic bodies are understood within media representations."12 This stasis also belies the fact that since the 1970s, both the media landscape and the category of Asian American have dramatically shifted, with the development of streaming technologies that allow viewers to "pull" content on their own schedule and the influx of ethnic groups whose national ties are no longer bound by US national borders. Against technological and transnational flows of culture, traditional media activists may have a hard time discerning what to do with crossover stars like Jackie Chan, Ken Watanabe, Lee Byung Hun, or—as of late—CL of 2NE1, all of whom move fluidly across various Asian and Asian American media landscapes. Thus, Lopez recommends that new media must demand new media strategies, and we must return "to the transnational alliances in which the Asian American Movement was rooted."13
  Chapters 2 and 3 operate in concert in that they delve into spaces of policy work and advertising. Examining the formation of the Asian Pacific America Media Coalition, early Asian American television shows and channels, as well as alliances forged with powerful media industries, Lopez shows how "positioning a community as a collective of powerful consumers is essential to convincing advertisers to pay attention to the demands of any sort."14 However, with respect to the Comcast/ NBC Universal merger, she cautions against Asian Americans forming a "dangerous alliance between progressive interest groups seeking to diversify representation and the free market conservatives whose policies often end up homogenizing the media and shutting minority voices out."15 She also offers Bollywood and the Korean wave as two examples that speak to "the flexibility [and expansion] of Asian American [End Page 161] cultural citizenship" and "help us to better understand the kinds of relationships Asian Americans might have to their country of origin or ancestry."16
  Chapter 3 explores the connection between the project of Asian American media activism and consumer movements. Of particular interest are Lopez's interactions with Asian American–specific marketing and communications firms like IW Group, AAAZA, and other members of the Asian American Advertising Federation (3AF). I would have liked to see further elaboration on her consideration of Asian American advertising work as activism. Lopez notes that "much of their work contributes positively to and supports the more explicitly political work of community organizers whose sole goal is to positively impact the lives of Asian Americans through structural change."17 However, as one of her interviewees states, "The truth is that we do this because the corporations hire us for their multicultural advertising."18 Elsewhere, Wendy Brown suggests that the success of neoliberal economization lies in the ascendancy of "neoliberalism as a governing form of reason, not just a power grab by capital."19 How might attending to the collusion of neoliberal best practices in corporations and their appropriation of terms like "diversity" and "multiculturalism" in the market help to better untangle the knots of advertising, consumption, and "activism"?
  Chapter 4 is the most innovative, compelling, and fully realized in Lopez's work, with an approach that shows an often brilliant synthesis of critical theory and close readings to explore the "moving target" of YouTube, five popular Asian American YouTubers (Michelle Phan, KevJumba, Nigahiga, Wong Fu Productions, and Clara C), and the "interactivity" and "intertextuality" of Asian American YouTube cultural producers and their audience. She looks at how "increased visibility on sites like YouTube contributes to a new kind of Asian American celebrity in the digital sphere" that also reveals "the development of transmedia branding across Asian American popular culture—a project that serves to create hubs of Asian American participatory culture that can be mobilized for different kinds of action."20 With a burgeoning digital archive whose performative proliferations even exceed the boundedness of the book itself, Lopez reveals how the overlapping virtual and physical spaces are helping to reconstitute the space-time of Asian American popular culture, and how this formation of an Asian American popular culture can become an alternative site, one to be activated by Asian American media activists.
  Chapter 5 continues from the space Lopez clears in chapter 4 to track the emergence of Asian Americans on Twitter through the "hashtag activism" of #HowIM-etYourRacism, #NotYourAsianSidekick, and #CancelColbert, the trio of which find their genesis through Korean American activist Suey Park. With careful discourse analysis, Lopez is able to locate the dynamic ways that Twitter can be mobilized to [End Page 162] raise the profile of an issue in the Asian American community while also being attentive to the racism, sexism, and homophobia that also arise in these highly mediated, yet highly unregulated, zones. Lopez also notes the importance of connecting the virtual with physical and material spaces and actions that will support it—but she reformulates how we conceive of space itself. Finally, she ends with a consideration of the combination of digital campaign, traditional protest, and consumer activism surrounding the casting decisions for the film adaptation of The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010).
  In conclusion, the scope and breadth of Lopez's research is impressive, combining the theoretical tools of media studies and cultural studies along with ethnography, in-depth interviews and visits to offices, archival research, and attendance at events. Lopez thus advances what George Lipsitz terms a "situated knowledge," by which she illuminates the productive ways her "liminal" identities as a mixed-race scholar-activist have affected her intellectual engagements, and hopes "to be in a position to reveal insights about the realities of media activism that accurately portray those most closely involved, but also useful to those still in the field trying to make a difference."21 For scholars like Lopez, research is never a cool, disinterested exercise in empiricism but rather an immersive, embodied, sometimes messy, and collaborative process in which researchers and subjects alike can come together in the interests of social justice and ultimately produce "a work that 'does something.'"22
  One of the definite strengths of the work is the precision, clarity, and ease of Lopez's prose. She also pushes the methodological boundaries of not just disciplinarity but also interdisciplinarity while maintaining a nuanced and rigorous eye to the subjects and objects of her critique. Her book joins a growing body of Asian American media scholarship that includes Darrell Hamamoto's Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (1994), Robert Lee's Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (1999), Kent Ono and Vincent Pham's Asian Americans and the Media (2008), and LeiLani Nishime, Shilpa Davé, and Tasha Oren's Global Asian American Popular Cultures (2016).23 Put together, this is a lively work whose impressive consortium of methods, theories, sites, and resources offer a model for how to conduct this type of research in a way that does not diminish the complexity of the subject while sustaining coherence from beginning to end. Scholars, educators, and students in Asian American studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and media and cultural studies will find this a welcome and useful text to add to their library collections. [End Page 163]
  Anthony Yooshin Kim
  Anthony Yooshin Kim is a transmedia and transdisciplinary scholar, writer, and artist. His research is situated at the nexus of French New Wave, third cinema, and US film and video, and he examines documentary film practices that emerge in moments of historical crisis, change, and revolution. He received his PhD in literature from University of California–San Diego and is currently an adjunct assistant professor in Asian American studies at Hunter College in New York City.

  Footnotes
  1. Lori Kido Lopez, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 24.

Word Count