Presentation by 2022-23 Humanities Center Fellow Eve Oishi

"Partial Form: An Experimental History of Asian American Film and Video"
Oishi’s book chronicles a particular history of Asian American film and video beginning with the first known film directed by an Asian American in 1914. Tarrying in the eras and spaces left out of comprehensive narratives of Asian American film and video, and placing this work within a history of transnational avant-garde visual art, literature, performance, and music, this book excavates and elevates the female and queer roots of Asian American cinema while simultaneously expanding and revising scholarly histories of U.S. avant-garde cinema. This project also proposes an analytic framework that examines formal and aesthetic innovation in relation to the fragile materiality of the media, a speculative methodology that offers tools of analysis for the study of media-based art forms more broadly.
About the Speaker
Eve Oishi (she/they interchangeably) is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Their primary research interests include Asian American cultural studies, independent and experimental film and video, transnational media, and gender and queer theory. They are recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship 2022-23.