Asian Americans on Television Page 1 of 14 PRINTED FROM the OXFORD RESEARCH ENCYCLOPEDIA, LITERATURE (oxfordre.com/literature). (c) Oxford University Press USA, 2020. All Rights Reserved. Personal use only; commercial use is strictly prohibited (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: State Library of Ohio: SLO; date: 21 May 2020 Subject: Film, TV, and Media Online Publication Date: May 2019 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.855 Asian Americans on Television Alison Yeh Cheung and Kent A. Ono Summary and Keywords For the vast majority of TV history, Asian Americans have played a minimal yet neverthe less infamous role. From the “yellow peril” to the “model minority,” racial stereotypes have been used to characterize Asians and Asian Americans on the television screen. In the rare instances when Asian American actors did appear, they either were in minor roles or as figures from a bad racist dream. Research on Asian Americans on TV comes from many disciplines and cuts across multiple fields such as media studies and Asian American studies. This article discusses the early history of Asian Americans on TV, traces notable figures in contemporary television, and concludes with the role of digital conver gence and the development of delivery and recovery platforms. It also provides an overview of scholarly literature written about Asian Americans on TV, including articles and books written about Asian American TV shows, the history of Asian American TV rep resentation, and research on TV and digital media, including YouTube and other transme dia convergence cultural materials. Keywords: Asian American, television, media, digital media, yellow peril, model minority Asian Americans have played limited, but infamous roles on TV; when Asian Americans do appear on TV, they have often been misrepresented or portrayed as racist stereotypes. In deed, as Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham have argued, these distorted and often deroga tory imaginings of Asian Americans in the media have perpetuated an unhealthy psy chosocial environment and a system of racial social ordering, thereby contributing to the perpetuation of unequal power relations in the United States. 1 Technological changes within the 21st century in the delivery of televisual content have led some to speculate that transformative changes of Asian American representation on TV are surely afoot. It is true that there has been an uptick in the percentage of Asian Americans represented and that some representations of Asian Americans have changed, especially in regard to the digital revolution and what is being called post-network TV over recent decades. 2 Despite these advances, skepticism remains over whether this constitutes or heralds substantive changes with lasting impact. While TV is just one type of communication medium, its significance cannot be overstat ed. Indeed, as Marshall McLuhan envisioned, TV has created a global village, in which far-flung people across the globe are able to connect by sharing perspectives and collec