BERTORELLO Fiona

Thesis Title

Reimagining the American Way: Film, Literature, and Cultural Memory in Asian American Representation

PhD Supervisor

Professor Sébastien LEFAIT (AMU, LERMA)

Abstract

This doctoral project explores how American film and literature function as vessels of cultural memory, focusing on the representation of Asian American identity, displacement, and belonging from World War II to the present. By examining cinematic and literary narratives, including The Joy Luck Club (1993), Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009), Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Pachinko (2022–), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and The Sympathizer (2024), the project investigates how Asian American creators reinterpret historical trauma, migration, and cultural heritage across generations and media forms. It argues that these works do not merely mirror American reality but actively shape national mythology and collective memory, transforming narratives of exclusion into ones of resistance and renewal.

The project begins with a reflection on the mythology of “the American Way” as constructed in wartime propaganda and mass media, particularly the Superman animated shorts produced by Fleischer and Famous Studios during World War II—Japoteurs (1942), Eleventh Hour (1942), and Jungle Drums (1943). These cartoons, emblematic of patriotic entertainment, reveal how national identity was imagined through racialized oppositions, depicting Asian characters as dehumanized threats to democracy. Superman, as the symbolic guardian of the “American Way,” defends an idealized, moralized version of the United States, implicitly white and exclusionary. These representations illustrate how ideology and visual culture co-constructed American collective memory, foreshadowing the persistent marginalization of Asian Americans throughout U.S. history.

Historically, exclusionary policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Japanese American internment under Executive Order 9066 (1942) institutionalized this marginalization, defining Asian Americans as perpetual outsiders. Works like Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy (1976) and Jerry Stanley’s I Am an American (1994) document the moral and psychological scars of these injustices, which continue to shape both lived experience and cultural representation. By tracing this historical continuum, from legal exclusion to cultural stereotyping, the project situates Asian American cultural production as a form of historical redress and reimagining, rewriting national memory through film, literature, and media.

The Vietnam War marks a pivotal transition in this genealogy of representation. If Superman’s 1940s battles were fought in the name of freedom and democracy, the Vietnam War shattered that mythology, exposing the moral contradictions at the heart of American exceptionalism. In films such as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Hearts and Minds (1974), America’s image as a liberator collapses under the weight of imperial violence. For Asian American writers and filmmakers, the Vietnam War becomes a symbolic space of trauma and displacement, a war remembered differently depending on which side of the Pacific one stands. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) and its 2024 HBO adaptation challenge the unilateral narrative of American heroism, re-centering the refugee as both witness and critic of empire. As Nguyen writes in Nothing Ever Dies (2016), “all wars are fought twice— the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

This project thus establishes a genealogy of representation that traces how American cultural narratives evolve from exclusionary propaganda to hybrid and self-reflective forms of storytelling. From Superman’s mythic defense of “truth and justice” to Shang-Chi’s negotiation of diaspora and identity, American popular culture reveals its own contradictions. Contemporary reimaginings such as Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Blue Beetle (2023), and Ms. Marvel (2022) appropriate and subvert the superhero genre, transforming it into a vessel for multicultural expression and postcolonial critique. These works complicate the binaries of hero and villain, East and West, belonging and exile, challenging who gets to define “the American Way.”

In contemporary Asian American storytelling, whether through the emotional generational lens of The Joy Luck Club or the ironic subversion of The Sympathizer, memory becomes a mode of resistance. These works transform inherited trauma into creative acts of remembrance, reclaiming agency through storytelling. They challenge the enduring mythology of the American nation by exposing its exclusions and reimagining belonging as multiplicity. Collectively, these narratives propose a new kind of American identity, one that is diasporic, intersectional, and continuously redefined through memory.

Key Words

Asian American Studies – Cultural Memory – Representation – War and Trauma – Diaspora – American Popular Culture