Yellow Dollars, White Masks: Hollywood and the performance of progressive texts

Crazy Rich Asians offers an outlet for Asian American political energy. The success of the film has been subsidized by communicative capitalism and the draw or duties of a manufactured community. My theoretical critique of CRA looks at the production, subsidization, and consumption of this film within the context of representation in the US for Asian Americans. The term Yellow Dollars describes the neoliberal view of our financial worth and its reduction of our diverse identities and experiences down to a generalized racial grouping. If representation comes at this expense, we must question the benefits of this system of recognition. By allowing capital and consumerism to become the strongest part of our action framework, how we see ourselves, define our interests and approach the world, we restrict ourselves to behaving “appropriately” within the system if capitalist recognition and our terms of recognition become more entangled with an exploitative system of global capitalism.