[The] dream of an Asian subject so impenetrably protected by wealth, so inculcated in faultless taste and beauty, so globally at ease, and so properly educated that he or she can go anywhere and not suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous racist discrimination accrues its most intense gratification under the assumption of universal anti-Asian racism.[…]
If the displays of internationalism and cosmopolitanism in both novel and film turn out to mean the mastery of Euro-American culture and style, it is because all the “real Asians” (that is, Asians outside of the United States) that we see in this film are postcolonial subjects.
— Anne Anlin Cheng (Los Angeles Review of Books)
Across media industries, digital strategists and advertisers of all races are preparing for the arrival of #NewMajority, the moment in which racially minoritized people will become the majority of the consumer population. The #NewMajority entrepreneurs don’t seek any broad political transformation. Rather, they focus on the potential for individual psychic transformation, offering media representation as an antidote to institutional and internalized racism. This strategy is consistent with the oversimplifications of psychological studies circulated in the mainstream media that demonstrate a flattened, one-to-one correlation between media representation and mental health. I term this attitude “messianic visibility”: an overinvestment in the idea that insistently normative cinematic identification possesses transformative, even curative, political and personal potential. Messianic visibility offers up cinema as a public fantasy site for identification and self-completion—for “feeling seen”.[…]
The media surrounding CRA cruelly encouraged the idea that a minoritized group or person achieves full psychic personhood only upon their recognition as a market—and as marketable. Messianic visibility diverts race consciousness from political resistance into an overidentification with capital.
— Melissa Phruksachart: The Bourgeois Cinema of Boba Liberalism (Film Quarterly, 2020)
Synopsis: An American-born Chinese economics professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore for his best friend's wedding, only to get thrust into the lives of Asia's rich and famous.