Seeing Myself Through Film: Diasporic Belongings and Racial Identifications

Abstract

Through critical autoethnography, I explore memories with film that I have drawn upon to form hybrid diasporic identifications located in “new ethnicities” that are situated between dominant White racial meanings of home and transnationally informed meanings of homeland. Recalling my memory of watching Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, I recognize that my identification with Bruce Lee (Jason Scott Lee) and his relationship with Linda Lee Caldwell (Lauren Holly) was situated in my desire for White acceptance, which was manifest in my heterosexual romantic interests in White women. I unravel the ways in which racial isolation and a desire for acceptance and visibility created an internalized politics of desire rooted in dominant racial hierarchies. The second narrative examines my viewing of The Last Present, a Korean film, in a Seoul theater. Seeing a love story centered on a romantically involved Asian man in a relationship with an Asian woman, especially a Korean man and woman, was something I had never previously known, and its presence made visible its absence in my mediated life in the United States. This changed my sense of self, my relationship to dominant culture as part of the Korean diaspora, and my sexual and romantic interests. Because I am in the diaspora, my identification is found in what Hall refers to as new ethnicities, situated in the gaps between the local, dominant culture and transnationally received ethnic, homeland culture.