Diasporic Televisual Culture in the Transpacific Mobilities (1993-2023)

The thesis explores and re-conceptualizes a diasporic televisual culture by examining the television narratives centered on diasporic communities and experiences in transpacific crossings. The television dramas analyzed in this thesis span from 1993 to 2023, tracing the multidirectional trajectories of transpacific migration from East Asia to North America and the televisual representation of the described journeys, individuals, and stories. Drawing on previous theorization by Sinclair, Cunningham, and Naficy, who have elaborated similar terminologies such as “diasporic media,” “ethnic television,” “exile television,” and “diaspora television,” this thesis intends to reconsider the relationality between TV and diaspora beyond defining a subgenre in the institution of television. The thesis disentangles questions concerning the meanings of diasporic/diaspora television, such as whether the diasporic components address the television producers, the audiences, or the stories. In particular, the thesis seeks to resolve the following questions: How does television form multiple senses of self, community, and homeland for those in the North American diaspora, as well as those who have returned to China? What kinds of televisual language are used to represent feelings of displacement, disconnection, and destruction? How does television provide the means of collective recognition of the hardships of life in the diaspora? How can diasporic television inform discussions of multiculturalism as a discursive Western construct? Moving beyond discussions of diasporic television as a genre or category, this thesis argues for a framework to study television and diaspora as a relational culture of connection that generates a new understanding of the increasing mobility of world transportation and evolving forms of televisual media. Utilizing both ethnography and textual analysis, this research draws upon my long-term observation of diasporic media uses in the Chinese-Canadian community. This research also offers a meticulous textual reading of selected television dramas that reflect on the framework of transpacific diasporic storytelling. Across a range of case studies, I delineate diasporic televisual culture in four aspects: the national, the intercultural, the communal and the spatial-temporal. At last, the thesis contributes to ongoing discussions of identity politics by understanding differences across national, ethnic and cultural identities through the lived experiences of being Asian in North America.