I'm writing on filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem’s documentary series, specifically situating her project as reflective of her anxiety associated with the United States national historical erasure that marks Korean transnational adoption, which is an erasure that has led to a subsequent Asian adoption movement that has increasingly become globally popular since the Korean War. I am positioning Deann's media project as reflective of her ultimate concern for the repercussions of history-unwritten or forgotten --- repercussions embodied by the contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American contemporary culture, specifically within the show Modern Family.
For me, what makes Liem’s personal story and her overall project of rewriting the Korean adoption experience and the ‘adoptee diaspora’ so interesting, is the way in which she takes up the documentary form in a serial model, and the way in which her historical rewriting project evolves within this serial model. She introduced her personal story with Third Person Plural (2000), where she maps out her journey as a Korean adoptee in realizing and accepting her three separate identities, bringing together her American and Korean families in an effort to write and validate her personal history as well as come to terms with her notion of ‘home’ and homeland. She then produces a sequel documentary, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee (2009), which serves as her journey to find the girl whose identity she assumed throughout her adolescence. Deann is now developing a less-personal, more comprehensive documentary called Geographies of Kinship - The Korean Adoption Story, which follows six Korean adoptees from the U.S. and Europe who trace their diverse experiences with identity. Deann takes up the documentary form in order to validate her experience and a ‘history untold’, while using it in a serial and seemingly obsessive way that reflects her anxieties associated with the histories-unwritten and subsequent misrepresentations/partial representations that she has personally assumed within her identity as well as that mark Asian adoption altogether. Deann’s documentaries take up the fact that the Korean model of adoption has permanently influenced and changed the way adoption is performed on a global scale, and subsequently raises questions about the familial, assimilation, and identity.
Looking at Deann's documentary series with these specific lenses will yield insight on the necessity of her mission as both a personal and historical rewriting project as well as a gesture to fill historical gaps within the United States imaginary. Moreover, I position her project as reflective of her anxieties associated with a tenuous identity crisis that is both private and public, reflected in global and local paradigms, as well as an identity characterized by affective and capital labor (with specific psychological, cultural, and gendered implications and effects). I will be looking at the ways her three films articulate her identity crisis within the context of rewriting her history untold, specifically addressing the constitutions of her personal history, as well as the history of transnational Asian adoption. Lastly, (as stated above) I am suggesting that Deann’s fears associated with the historical erasure of Korean transnational adoption are materialized in contemporary televisual representations of Asian adoption within American culture, specifically within the show Modern Family. Evidence of Deann’s anxieties associated with historical and cultural misrepresentation and erasure, manifest in the character Lily, daughter of gay couple Cameron and Mitchell. It’s in Lily’s vacant and mute demeanor (specifically in Season 1), that reveal a national erasure of history that Deann cannot seem to overcome.
1. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
2. Richard Fung, “Seeing Yellow: Asian Identities in Film and Video”
3. Ali Behdad : A Forgetful Nation - On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the US
4. David L. Eng, Transnational Adoption and Queer Diasporas
5. Haile Gerima “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs Lucy*”
6. Andreas Huyssen Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia
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