In this week’s episode, we take on a lighter topic (by our standards) and discuss Crazy Rich Asians! We debate opposing perspectives about the movie — one that is critical of its limited and narrow representation of Asian-American (and, by extension, Asian) identity versus one that celebrates its empowering story, which features an all-Asian cast (with strong female characters) telling a distinctly Asian story. In our conversation, we acknowledge all these strengths and weaknesses of the movie, in particular framing it in the context of other films that have sought to increase non-white representation in the cinema, such as Black Panther. In the end, we recognize the movie for what it is: a fun romantic comedy that is a first step (and not the final step) towards greater and more nuanced representation of non-white stories in Hollywood.
Thanks for listening!
Note: we also talk about what happened with our previous episode, which we re-uploaded under a different title. The short story is we’ve received feedback that the original episode was too offensive for general Indonesian sensibilities given its strong language. In the interest of keeping the important conversation going, we’ve taken out the profanity and re-uploaded the episode.
