Introduction

According to Pew Research Centre’s 2012 report on Asian Americans, they are the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States. At the same time, they are largely unseen or represented through racial stereotypes in the nation’s dominant screen industries. When speaking of the diverse community’s aspirations for socioeconomic mobility, research tends to focus on education and/or income levels. Similarly, according to the 2016 census, Australians claiming Asian ancestries constitute about 13% of the population and continue to grow every year. Chinese and Indian Australians (among others) also tend to be highly educated, and working in white-collar jobs, but are under or misrepresented in the media. As indicated in the part introduction, there is research emerging on how Asian aspirations for better education for their children are leading to particular patterns in Australian public schools (Ho, 2020). This chapter argues for a broader understanding of migrant aspiration that transcends a rational understanding of upward mobility and includes how leading second-generation migrant media practitioners reflect the affective, everyday lives and aspirations of their communities on screen. Such mediated stories tend to be in a range of genres, such as stand-up comedy, drama, or reality television. What is vital for our understanding of their aspirations is unpacking how these mediated stories combine affect with critique that could lead to broader social change on issues of migration and perceptions of migrants.

The mediation outlined in this chapter is, then, a manifestation of their aspirations, albeit not primarily of a material nature. The mobility they seek is not merely to do with climbing the next rung of the socio-economic ladder but more importantly to display confidence in their ethnic identity and demand inclusion in the white-dominated spaces of their countries at the same time (in place of stereotypes of being submissive, or waiting to be chosen). In the case of the two mediated texts explored in this chapter, this kind of aspiration even moves beyond demanding inclusion in the white mainstream or challenging dominant stereotypes of one’s community. It does so by de-centring whiteness and seeking to re-define an (invisibly) white national identity and culture.