Ethnic studies scholars have long bemoaned the near absence of Asians on the big and small screens and popular music charts in the United States, rendering them as outsiders vis-à-vis the American public sphere. In the last few years, however, Asians have sprung up on shows like “Glee” and “America's Best Dance Crew” in disproportionately large numbers, challenging entrenched stereotypes and creating new audiovisual associations with Asianness. This essay considers how emerging Asian American hiphop dancers and musicians negotiate their self-representation in different contexts and what their strategies reveal about the postmillennial Asian youth's relationship to American and transpacific culture and the outer limits of American music.

This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2013 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
2013
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits copying and redistributing the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.