Definition

Historically, cinema has been used by the colonial-capitalist ruling class to perpetuate oppression by reinforcing racist stereotypes and harmful narratives about oppressed people. Cinema can also be a powerful tool for representation and personal transformation.  In a modern context, some filmmakers see cinema as not just a vehicle for representation, but more importantly, a vehicle to expose systemic oppression, the brutal conditions imposed on oppressed people and their resistance to it. We use examples from Black, Latino, and Asian American film to demonstrate cinema as capitalist industry, representation, and transformation, but it is not an exhaustive, complete overview of cinema within Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. We encourage using these concepts to Indigenous film and other film as well.

Cinema as Capitalist Industry

The 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation established cinema as a weapon of oppression and reinforcement of colonial narratives against Black people. This racist movie portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes that protected white women and its Black characters (who were in blackface) as “unintelligent, sex-hungry savages.” It was known as the first blockbuster Hollywood hit earning more than $10 million (equivalent to $200 million today) and was the first movie screened in the White House, watched by President Woodrow Wilson. Although the movie was protested against by Black leaders and organizations such as the NAACP, it was popular and celebrated among much of the white population. As noted by a reporter in Boston for the Boston Evening American, “There was general and vigorous applause [in the theater] when the Ku Klux Klan galloped to the rescue.”1 The movie’s commercial success and perpetuation of colonial narratives against Black people contributed to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and led to numerous lynchings and brutality committed against Black people across the U.S., including the horrific June 1919 lynching of John Hartfield, which upward of ten thousand white people participated in. Birth of a Nation (1915) exposes the anti-Black origins of cinema and how it’s been weaponized to maintain the oppression of Black people within the U.S.

“Get Out” Official Trailer released on October 4, 2016.2

In recent times, the public’s growing demand for counterhegemonic narratives has pressured Hollywood to cater to Black audiences and other marginalized communities. Though imperfect, Get Out and other recent mainstream films like They Cloned Tyrone and Sinners have subverted or broke from the tropes, trappings, and traditions of Hollywood to illustrate and resist the oppression of Black people. In particular, Jordan Peele’s psychological horror and comedy film Get Out (2017) was produced during (but released after) the Obama era when there was a false notion of a “post-racial America,” despite the persistence of police terror against Black people and other issues. Get Out challenges this false notion of a “post-racial America” by exposing the racism of white people who profess to be progressive and weaponize it. The Armitage family, the villains of the story who have been abducting Black people, are liberals in upstate New York who “would have voted for Obama for a third term if [they] could” instead of the typical overt neo-Nazis or white supremacists. In this way, Get Out also challenges the way that films about slavery and oppression of Black people often refuse to connect individual acts of brutality to a historical system of bondage and oppression. Aside from films like Haile Gerima’s Sankofa and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation (2016), “traumatic scenes usually happen at the hand of a sadistic overseer whose individual behavior often fails to connect to a historical system of enduring oppression.”3 Although some mainstream movies like Get Out have been effective tools of political education and raising consciousness, they are still beholden to the pressures of Hollywood as a capitalist industry. For Get Out specifically, the producer stated that, “The biggest challenge with something as original as Get Out is that the system is built to resist it. The biggest challenge is to push it through the system—I can’t be more specific than that. The more original something is, the harder it is to get made.”4 Aside from ideology, many filmmakers have been restricted in a technical sense as well with the three act structure, for example. Filmmakers are often not in complete control of what they create, which raises the importance of independent filmmaking.

Similarly, Latino cinema has always developed in dialogue with the economic structures of the U.S. film industry, revealing how Hollywood’s commercial imperatives shape what kinds of stories reach screens. Henry Puente’s analysis of the 1990-1995 period shows that Latino films were not produced or distributed in a neutral marketplace but were instead funneled through a “three-tiered” hierarchy that prioritized mainstream studio products, relegated crossover projects to specialty divisions, and pushed most Latino-directed or Latino-themed films into the lowest tier of independent distributors.5 This structure significantly limited Latino filmmakers’ access to marketing resources, wide theatrical release, and national visibility, which effectively determined which images of Latinidad were legible or profitable to the industry. Historically, Hollywood’s economic relationship with Mexican and Mexican American audiences has also been shaped by geopolitical and market concerns.6 During the 1910s, when the U.S. felt no need to appeal to Mexican viewers, films freely depicted degrading stereotypes and in the 1920s and 30s, when Hollywood saw commercial potential in Latin American markets, representation became less overtly hostile. These changes show how Latino representation in Hollywood can be tied to economic calculations about audience value and cinema as an industry shaped by structures of capital, profit, and marketability. 

This industry logic is made especially clear in the long production history of West Side Story. Acevedo-Muñoz’s chapter “West Side Story and the Hispanic Problem” demonstrates that the film’s racial politics cannot be separated from Hollywood’s profit-driven strategies.7 The 1961 film’s use of brownface makeup, exaggerated accents, and the casting of non-Latino actors in key Puerto Rican roles was a direct outcome of industrial practices that privileged bankability over authenticity. Studio executives believed recognizable white stars like Natalie Wood would attract broader audiences, even as they darkened her skin to make her “legibly ethnic”. This reflects a broader Hollywood strategy in which stereotypes function as low-risk, easy-to-sell signifiers that align with audience expectations and thereby help secure commercial success. West Side Story flourished financially because its portrayal of Puerto Ricans as dangerous, hyperemotional, and gang-affiliated resonated with Cold War–era fears of immigration, urban “disorder,” and interracial intimacy. Acevedo-Muñoz further shows how the continued revival and reproduction of West Side Story, from the Broadway original to the 1961 film to the 2021 remake, illustrates Hollywood’s commitment to recycling profitable intellectual property even when its racial narratives are outdated or harmful. In this way, the industry’s capitalist logic has not only generated stereotypical Latino imagery but ensured its persistence over decades.

The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media8

The Latino Media Gap report and its graphic on Latino roles in the highest-grossing films from 2010–2013 underscore how these profit-driven representational patterns continue into the present. The data shows that in the top tier of the marketplace Latino actors are still overwhelmingly cast in criminal, militaristic, or otherwise stereotypical roles. This suggests that despite the emergence of independent or alternative Latino filmmaking that challenges these images, Hollywood’s dominant economic structures still favor and reproduce a narrow set of representations that are perceived as commercially safe. Popular television that further reflects this pattern include Modern Family, with Gloria Delgado-Pritchett who is depicted as a “sexy spitfire” who is skilled with guns, and The Big Bang Theory, where half of the Latino cast are blue-collar workers or criminals.

By the late 20th century, Asian American filmmakers were stuck in a hierarchical system: mainstream studios saw their stories as risky, specialty divisions gave limited help, and independent circuits became the main place to work. Visual communications, originally embraced a pan-ethnic, activist mission to serve underrepresented communities, but overtime, similar to everything else, was adopted into the professionalized structures that constrained its radical potential. In a term coined “boba liberalism,” that acknowledges the phenomenon in which Asian American visibility is celebrated only when it is  commercially safe, aesthetically appealing, and easily digestible by mainstream audiences. Under boba liberalism, stores that critique structural inequality, labor exploitation, or social hierarchies are often sidelined, while films that showcase consumer-friendly images are rewarded. This concept identifies the shift from challenging, radical portrayal of Asian Americans to more surface-level representation. Even today, Hollywood’s support for Asian-led films is still largely market-driven.

Asian American cinema has always operated within Hollywood with tension, which has historically treated Asian American film as a product to profit off of rather than as cultural expression. In a review of Stephen Teo’s work Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema by Stephen Melissa Croteau explains that his work works to confront the hegemony of Western Theoretical approaches to cinema that involve a more superficial portrayal of Asian American.9 Similarly, Asian American filmmakers have to deal with industry rules that decide which stores are selected to get funding, distribution, and attention. It’s the tendency of Hollywood to pick and choose which stories get funding, distribution, and attention; supporting only Asian American films that they deem profitable, appeal to white audiences, or fit a simple “ethnic” label. Early Hollywood ignored Asian audiences and profited purely from stereotypes, such as dragon ladies, submissive women, emasculated men, and yellowface roles. Croteau described these characters as “sweeping generalizations” that painted the “‘East’ with a monochromatic brush.”10 These portrayals exemplified the racial stereotypes that were both exoticized and sold for profit.

“Crazy Rich Asians” Official Trailer released on April 23, 2018.11

Hollywood studios invest heavily in blockbuster films with production market budges, typically well over 65 million, aiming for mass appeal and large global crosses.12 In contrast, independent films typically operate on much smaller budgets. Frequently under 10 million, limiting their marketing and distribution potential. Even when Asian-led films succeed, the economy reflects this structural hierarchy. Crazy Rich Asians (2018), which exemplifies boba liberalism in action, grossed about $239 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, making it a rare commercial success for a culturally specific studio film. Meanwhile Searching (2018), another Asian-led narrative with critical acclaim, grossed about $75.5 million worldwide, a considerably smaller figure despite positive reception. These disparities show that even when Asian American stories break into mainstream consciousness, they are often evaluated and supported primarily according to profitability rather than cultural significance or radical insight.

Films like Crazy Rich Asians (2018) and Searching (2018) show boba liberalism in action: they celebrate glamorous frictionless Asian lives and offer what Phruksachart calls “messianic visibility,” giving audiences the appearance of progress without addressing deeper inequities.13 Rebecca Wanzo, a scholar of film and African American studies, explores how comedy can serve as both a form of cultural expression and a lens for understanding race, identity, and social critique. In her article “Ghosts of Cho: Abjection and Asian American–born Comedy” (2023), Wanzo similarly notes that Hollywood often leverages minoritized performers’ visibility for commercial gain, reinforcing existing hierarchies.14 In this way boba liberalism frames success in terms of profitability and surface-level diversity. In this sense, the goal is not to reject mainstream representations that allow Asian American actors to break into the industry, but to ensure that it can coexist with bolder, riskier filmmaking that allows for a more expansive vision of Asian American storytelling.

Documentary about the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement called “L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement” shows another path for independent filmmakers.15

As part of the solution to these issues, the L.A. Rebellion film movement, a collective of independent Black, Asian, and Latino filmmakers from UCLA’s Film School in the late 60s and 70s, demonstrates that today’s filmmakers can work together to build a film movement that contends with Hollywood. The L.A. Rebellion movement includes filmmakers Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett, and more. Reem Jubran, a recent Palestinian film student at UCLA’s film school, says the L.A. Rebellion opened a path for independent filmmakers like her, “not to capitalize off of our struggle but to change our narrative and show the world who we actually are.”16 Reem Jubran shows the responsibility of today’s filmmakers to carry forward the legacy of the L.A. Rebellion film movement, rather than appease Hollywood. Larry Clark and Eddie Wong, who were part of L.A. Rebellion, describe some of their technical struggles as novice filmmakers along with how little resources they had, and how grassroots community support really supported them, such as going into a local restaurant and asking if they could use it for filming a scene. This shows both the possibilities and challenges for independent filmmakers who are either rejected by or choose not to work in Hollywood. Because of challenges like these, Haile Gerima speaks about the need to build a much more formidable and long-lasting film movement that resists cinema as a capitalist industry, “When we worked together, we were innovative. But white filmmakers make movies when they’re 50, 60. Charlie [Burnett] cannot get a penny, so the idea that we don’t go to our time of maturity cinematically, content-wise and form. We graduated into a desert. White kids graduated into an industry.”17

Cinema as Representation

The history of Latino cinema in the United States reveals how deeply film has participated in the construction of ethnic and racial identity. Early 20th-century films such as Let Katie Do It (1915) and Martyrs of the Alamo (1915) portrayed Mexicans through violently stereotypical images such as the “greaser”, the bandit, the buffoon, and the hypersexual deviant.18 These characters reflected and reinforced U.S. anxieties during moments of political tension with Mexico. Even the narratives themselves, such as the mining subplot in Let Katie Do It, where “good” Americans extract Mexican land, encode this dynamic into cinematic storytelling. Against this backdrop, more modern films like And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him (Severo Pérez, 1994) mark a crucial shift despite not being as widely circulated as more mainstream films. As Carolina Rocha argues, the film not only centers Chicano experiences but employs a fragmented, memory-based cinematic form to represent migration, cultural trauma, and collective history.19 Here, representation is not about inserting Latino faces into preexisting Hollywood genres and stereotypes, but about using cinema’s visual language to express cultural memory and resist historical erasure.

Hollywood has historically shaped how Asian Americans are seen, similar to other minority groups. Early films like The Cheat (1915), Broken Blossoms (1919), and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) portrayed Asians as dangerous outsiders or tragic figures. Croteau explains uses of “Eastern” philosophies, “proverbs, maxims, and aphorisms” instead of Western theory to counter these stereotypes.20 In Nguyen’s discussion of representational politics in the film series “Asian Americans” (2013), he notes that Hollywood has “flattened” Asian American identities into tokenized categories, simplifying them for mass audiences while erasing the complexity and diversity of real experiences.21 Hollywood repeated the stereotypical portrayals for decades, however, Films like Minari (2020), The Farewell (2019), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) push back against these stereotypes, exploring migration, trauma, and family life in ways that Western Hollywood narratives usually ignore. Croteau notes in her review that Teo calls this “Daoist transcendence,” a way of looking at stories beyond Western norms.22 However the historical representations of Asian Americans has forever changed how this ethnic population has been thought of and interacted with for years. Award recognition, or lack thereof, similarly highlights how Asian Americans highlight the disparities in recognition of Asian American films. Michelle Yoh’s Best Actress win in 2023 for Everything Everywhere All at Once was historic, yet it came after decades in which Asian performers were rarely given roles considered “award-worthy,” demonstrating the limits of the industry and the long lasting effects of historical representation.

Figure 1 Racial and Ethnic Representation Among Oscar® Nominees and Winners for Best Actor in a Leading Role (1951–2023)23
Figure 2 Racial and Ethnic Representation Among Oscar® Nominees and Winners for Best Actress in a Leading Role (1951–2023)24

Cinema as Transformation

Beyond industry constraints and representational struggles, Latino and Latinx filmmakers have used cinema as a transformative medium. Christopher González highlights this transformative power in the work of Robert Rodriguez, whose use of fantasy and science fiction disrupts the limited roles historically assigned to Latinx characters.25 By merging genre conventions with Latinx cultural signifiers, Rodriguez constructs speculative worlds in which Latinx identities are active agents, heroes, creators, and futurists rather than stereotypes. This strategy expands the possibilities available to Latinx audiences and asserts Latinx presence within genres from which they have long been excluded from. One of Rodriguez’s most recognizable examples is Spy Kids (2001), which centers a Latinx family in a fantasy–action narrative while normalizing their cultural identity. The film incorporates specific markers of Latinx culture, such as the Cortez surname, bilingual dialogue, and an adobe-style home, without exoticizing the family.26 Rodriguez drew on his own experiences growing up in a U.S. Mexican household, emphasizing familial dynamics that feel both culturally specific and universally relatable. By positioning Carmen and Juni Cortez as heroic protagonists, Rodriguez offers Latinx audiences representations of agency, ingenuity, and heroism that counter Hollywood’s stereotypical depictions.

Director Robert Rodriguez speaks about “Spy Kids” and Latino Representation.27

Rodriguez’s own reflections underscore the challenges of creating authentic Latinx representation in Hollywood. In this interview clip, he explains that studio executives initially resisted making the Cortez family Hispanic, arguing that such a choice would only appeal to Latino audiences and citing the absence of prior examples to prove otherwise. Rodriguez suggests that had a non-Hispanic filmmaker faced the same pushback, the studio likely would have prevailed. This highlights that while cinema has transformative potential, structural barriers remain for pioneering representation, underscoring the need for more filmmakers who are empowered and trained to advocate for cultural authenticity.

Many Asian and Asian American filmmakers are also utilizing film to rethink Asian identity and storytelling. Directors like Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), Kogonada (Columbus, 2017), the Daniels (Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari, 2020), and Lulu Wang (The Farewell, 2019) experiment with genre and style, opening new ways to tell stories. Croteau describes the use of Daoist and Confucian ideas in Teo’s film “Eastern approaches to Western Film: Asian Perception and Aesthetics in Cinema” creates fresh avenues for reading cinematic transcendence through an “Eastern” Perspective.28 These films explore diaspora, memory, and identity beyond Hollywood’s constraints and set hierarchy. Independent and digital platforms are especially important for filmmakers who want to resist profit-driven limits. Teo’s frameworks “move film studies away from Euro- and American-centric hegemony”, and independent filmmakers use this to create work grounded in community, experimentation, and critique.29 Phruksachart points out that groups like VC and modern collectives highlight activism, keeping Asian American cinema a site of resistance.30 Digital creators on YouTube, TikTok, and streaming platforms also combine comedy, activism, and identity exploration, continuing the legacy of the L.A. Rebellion.

True transformation happens when mainstream representation exists alongside experimental and critical cinema. Croteau emphasizes the “interpenetrating non-dualism of East and West,” a principle guiding Asian American filmmakers who resist capitalist “safe” narratives. Nguyen reminds us that transformation must address structural inequalities, not just surface-level diversity.31

“Sankofa” Official trailer for Netflix re-release on September 20, 2021.32

Films that emerged from the L.A. Rebellion movement such as Sankofa by Haile Gerima and Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash show that film can go beyond representation in favor of transformation and liberation. Sankofa by Haile Gerima is a story confronting the horrors of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved and it portrays African people’s resistance to slavery as an act of heroism. As a synopsis, the main character, a young Black American woman named Mona, is a fashion model who has gone to Elmina Castle in Ghana for a photoshoot. She is not aware that Elmina Castle was a major holding facility where enslaved African people were imprisoned in horrific conditions before being forced onto ships headed to the Americas in the Transatlantic slave trade to be sold and exploited. Mona is then suddenly transported in space and time to a plantation in North America and assumes the role of Shola, an enslaved African woman who labors at an unspecified plantation in the New World and is presumably Mona’s ancestor. At the end, after this extremely traumatic experience along with the comradery and community Shola builds with fellow enslaved Africans who resist slavery together, Mona is “metamorphosed once again-returned to the present and [arrives] to a new consciousness of her African identity.”33

One of the horrors that confronts Shola and other characters in the story is sexual violence used as a tool by the white slaveholder class to reinforce colonial domination over the enslaved. As Dr. Z’étoile Imma, says, “While the repetition of the white man slaver’s violation of the Black female body is a dangerously problematic trope, I argue that Gerima’s film reenacts the terrible banality of slave exploitation and significantly performs a consciously violent objectification of the Black female body that ultimately serves to highlight the transformative will of the enslaved Black woman.”34 In the climax of Sankofa’s story, the enslaved African people on this plantation courageously revolt against this system of slavery and as part of this, the protagonist Shola kills slaveholder Mister Lafayette who intended to sexually violate her again. This act of resistance by Shola is transformative. After she kills slaveholder Lafayette, Shola says she keeps “running and running and running” as the camera follows her racing away from the plantation, and despite the fact that she is scarred from the extreme violence imposed on her, she has now asserted herself as a “fugitive with an inexhaustible desire to be free.”35 In contrast to Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation (2016) which made the error of “constructing Black men’s rebellion as the catalytic response to witnessing Black women’s sexual violation by white men while silencing Black women through victimization and ‘den[ying] the[m] their revolutionary gestures,’”36 Haile Gerima in Sankofa does not make this error and instead portrays Black women and men as equal partners and leaders with just as much power and motivation for revolt against the system of slavery. As Dr. Imma says “[in Sankofa] Black women independently negotiate, cultivate, propagate, and lead small- and large-scale acts of resistance that are not only drawn from the rage born of their personal trauma as survivors of multiple sexual violations, but are also propelled by a developing desire for and understanding of the possibilities of freedom…the central Black men as captives, healer-rebel Shango most specifically, are shown tenderly and passionately caring for the injured bodies and spirits of the Black women they love.”37

“Daughters of the Dust” – Official 25th Anniversary Trailer released on May 9, 201738

Daughters of the Dust by Julie Dash, was a response to Blaxploitation films that came to over-represent African Americans in Hollywood film in the 70’s when Julie Dash grew up. As Dash said in an interview for Vogue in 2022, “I always felt that the stories of others were told with such elegance and grace, and our stories were just kind of like brutal.”39 The story takes place on the Sea Islands which are off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, which is unique in the fact that despite African people being forcibly transported there through the Transatlantic slave trade, they were able to hold onto much of their Gullah cultural heritage and traditions because of the isolation of the islands and the fact that many of the slaveowners did not want to live there due to frequent mosquito disease outbreaks that Africans had some immunity from. When slavery was brought to an end in 1865, the white slave-owning class that remained gradually migrated back to mainland America and left behind an African American community with their own distinctive, original culture of Gullah also known as Geechee. The movie is about the struggles and debates among Gullah people on whether to start a new life in the mainland up North or to remain on the island to preserve their Gullah culture that they worry would weaken with migration.

As a challenge to the three-act narrative structure common to Hollywood films, Dash instead structures the story in “the way an old relative would retell it, not linear but always coming back around. It’s all connected, but how you get to the information is different.”40 Also as opposed to “plastic representation” which is defined by Kristen Warner as a current mainstream trend toward a hollow representation for its own sake, Daughters of the Dust is an authentic representation of African American Gullah culture.41 Betty Knight and Matthew Legatt argue that although most scholarly work on the film understandably comes from a critical feminist perspective due to its groundbreaking representation of Black women, the film should also be examined as “a critique of the European Empire, its legacy and its continued devastating impact on African Americans and Black people globally.”42 This can be seen in Eli and his grandmother Nana Peazant’s argument about his struggle to hold onto Gullah spirituality and migrating to the mainland up North.43 This conversation highlights the catastrophic impact of colonialism and slavery in the way that enslaved African people in the Americas were forcibly dispossessed from their relationship to Africa, but despite all of that, Gullah culture also shows how resilient African people in the U.S. are in preserving their relationship to Africa and carrying it forward for future generations. Sankofa and Daughters of the Dust go above and beyond positive representation. They are powerful examples of cinema and cultural work that contribute to the Black Radical Tradition to raise political consciousness in the fight for freedom.

Contributors

  • Lindsay Fouche
  • Logan Mouton
  • Shannon Tang

Footnotes

  1. Lehr, Dick. The Birth of a Movement : How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights. [Second edition], PublicAffairs, 2017. 255 ↩︎
  2. Universal Pictures. “Get Out – In Theaters This February – Official Trailer.” YouTube video, 2m 33s. October 4, 2016. https://youtube.com/watch?v=sRfnevzM9kQ. ↩︎
  3. Letort, Delphine. “Get Out from the Horrors of Slavery.” Black Camera 14, no. 2 (2023): 295-307. https://dx.doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.14.2.17. ↩︎
  4. Kit, Borys. “‘Get Out’ Producer on the Film’s Biggest Challenge: ‘The System Is Built to Resist It.’” The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter, 23 Feb. 2018 ↩︎
  5. Henry Puente, “U.S. Latino Films (1990–1995): A Three-Tiered Marketplace,” Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 31, no. 1 (2012): 51–70. ↩︎
  6. Gary D. Keller, “The Image of the Chicano in Mexican, United States, and Chicano Cinema: An Overview,” Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 10, no. 2/3 (1983): 9–208. ↩︎
  7. Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, “West Side Story and the Hispanic Problem,” in The Cambridge Companion to West Side Story, ed. Paul R. Laird and Elizabeth A. Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 170–187. ↩︎
  8. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chelsea Abbas, Luis Figueroa, and Samuel Robson, The Latino Media Gap: A Report on the State of Latinos in U.S. Media (New York: Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University, 2014). ↩︎
  9. Michael Croteau, “Review of Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema, by Stephen Teo,” Philosophy East & West 71, no. 1 (2021): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2021.0015. ↩︎
  10. Ibid. ↩︎
  11. Roadshow Films. “CRAZY RICH ASIANS | Official Trailer | 2018 [HD].” YouTube video, 2m 46s. April 23, 2018. https://youtube.com/watch?v=14ZHRBfpeNg. ↩︎
  12. ZipDo. “Film Industry Statistics: Budget, Box Office, and Market Trends.” ZipDo. Accessed December 18, 2025. https://zipdo.co/film-industry-statistics/. ↩︎
  13. May Adadol Ingawanij Phruksachart, “The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2020): 59–65, https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2020.73.3.59. ↩︎
  14. Wanzo, R. (2023). Ghosts of Cho: Abjection and Asian American–Born Comedy. Film Quarterly, 77(2), 62–66. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2023.77.2.62 ↩︎
  15. Gould, Tamara, and Angela Boisvert. L.A. Rebellion: A Cinematic Movement | Artbound | Season 14 Episode 3 | PBS SoCal. Shoes Off Media, 18 Oct. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7YKyRWfwZI&t=584s. ↩︎
  16. Ibid. Timestamp: 26:33 ↩︎
  17. Ibid. Timestamp: 34:42 ↩︎
  18. Williams, Linda “Type and Stereotype: Chicano Images in Film,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (1980): 14–17. ↩︎
  19. Carolina Rocha, “And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him in Latino Film History,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 42, no. 1 (2023): 29–50. ↩︎
  20. Michael Croteau, “Review of Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema, by Stephen Teo,” Philosophy East & West 71, no. 1 (2021): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2021.0015 ↩︎
  21. Nguyen, A. A. T. (2025). Representational Politics in the Film Series “Asian Americans”: The Contestation of Identity Essentialism. The Journal of Communication Inquiry, 49(2), 161–180. https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221096644 ↩︎
  22. Ibid. ↩︎
  23. Best Actor in a Leading Role, The Oscars Inclusion List (2025), accessed December 18, 2025, https://inclusionlist.org/oscars/category/2025/lead-actor.
    ↩︎
  24. Best Actress in a Leading Role, The Oscars Inclusion List, The Inclusion List (2025), accessed December 18, 2025, https://inclusionlist.org/oscars/category/2025/lead-actress. ↩︎
  25. Christopher González, “The Latinx Fantastic: Robert Rodriguez and the Power of His Speculative Storytelling,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 63, no. 2 (2021): 151–172. ↩︎
  26. Rafael Motamayor, “More Than Two Decades Later, Spy Kids Is Still a Benchmark for Latinx Representation in Blockbusters,” SYFY, March 31, 2021. ↩︎
  27. Robert Rodriguez on “Spy Kids” and Latino Representation, YouTube video, 1:15, posted by Overheard with Evan Smith, February 10, 2019, https://youtu.be/BML-lVUzTdU. ↩︎
  28. Croteau, M. (2021). Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema by Stephen Teo (review). Philosophy East & West, 71(1), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2021.0015 ↩︎
  29. Ibid. ↩︎
  30. Phruksachart, M. (2020). THE BOURGEOIS CINEMA OF BOBA LIBERALISM. Film Quarterly, 73(3), 59–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/FQ.2020.73.3.59 ↩︎
  31. Anh A. T. Nguyen, “Representational Politics in the Film Series Asian Americans: The Contestation of Identity Essentialism,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 49, no. 2 (2025): 161–180, https://doi.org/10.1177/01968599221096644. ↩︎
  32. ARRAY, “Sankofa | Official Trailer” posted Sept 20, 2021, by ARRAY, YouTube, 1:12, https://youtu.be/jUWLAXHj2SU?si=-yLaKmDp9ZL_Ew6b. ↩︎
  33. Z’étoile Imma. “Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, the Black Female Body, and the Uses of Sexual Violence in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa.” Screen Bodies (Print), vol. 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 23–37, https://doi.org/10.3167/screen.2021.060203. ↩︎
  34. Ibid. ↩︎
  35. Ibid. ↩︎
  36. Ibid. ↩︎
  37. Ibid. ↩︎
  38. BFI, “Daughters of the Dust – 25th anniversary trailer” posted May 9, 2017, by BFI, YouTube, 1:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRpTae7jmi4. ↩︎
  39. Knight, Betty, and Matthew Leggatt. “Daughters of the Dust: Rephrasing the African American Experience in Julie Dash’s Film and Novel of the Same Name.” The Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 53, no. 3–4, 2025, pp. 87–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2025.2517586. ↩︎
  40. Ibid. ↩︎
  41. Ibid. ↩︎
  42. Ibid. ↩︎
  43. Julie Dash et al., Daughters of the Dust. Kino on Video, 2000. Timestamp: 21:17
    ↩︎

Bibliography

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