Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 81

Film and Asian American Literature

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mind which enables us, both as individuals and as a species, to deduce from the
multiplicity of individual experiences a unified language”; there is a “mass of
schematisms, innate governing principles, which guide our social and intellectual
and individual behavior”; there must be “something biologically given, unchange
able, a foundation for whatever it is that we do with our mental capacities” (3).
Foucault, on the other hand, avoided the abstract question of whether human na
ture exists but asked instead: “How has the concept of human nature functioned in
society?” Taking the sciences of life during the eighteenth century as an example,
Foucault draws a distinction between the actual operational categories within a
specific discipline at a particular historical moment and those broad conceptual
markers such as “life,” or “human nature,” which, in his opinion, has had very
little importance in the internal changes of scientific disciplines. He posits that in
the history of knowledge the notion of human nature seems mainly “to have played
the role o f ..designating certain types of discourse in relation to or in opposition to
theology or biology or history” (4). Foucault’s attempt to contextualize the study
of the definition of human nature and to challenge “the regularities of science”
epitomizes the essence of the postcolonial movement. His questions are equally
applicable to the study of cultural representations. A close examination of
Hollywood’s portrayals of the Asian American experience seems to confirm fur
ther that the study of the definition of Asian American literature and cultures is not
as critical as the understanding of its history, its relationship with both its ethnic
cultural heritages and the mainstream American culture, and the way it is mis(sing)
and (re)presented.
California State University, Monterey Bay

Qun Wang

Notes

1.

2.

3.

Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth seems to push stereotypes to the other extreme: Le
Ly Hayslip’s American relatives are portrayed as wasteful, overweight, and insensi
tive.
Ken Kesey refused to accept an Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest
in 1976. He believed that the movie version had changed his original thematic inten
tions. In the book, the reader sees things through a Native American Chieftain’s eyes.
But in the movie, a middle-aged white person played by Jack Nicholson becomes the
central character. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple was nominated for 11 Academy
Awards, although it failed to win any. Many critics believe that the movie, in compari
son with the book, is too “Hollywood.”
In “Chinese-American Literature” (Asian-American Authors), Kai-yu Hsu and Helen
Palubinskas contends that both Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendant and
Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter “seem to confirm rather than modify a
stereotyped image of the Chinese and their culture”; they “tend to suggest the Chinese