Popular Culture Co-production and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia

Edited by Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben Ari

Publication Year: 2012

In recent years, popular culture production in East and Southeast Asia has undergone major changes with the emergence of a system that organizes and relocates production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Freed from the constraints associated with autonomous national economies, popular culture has acquired a transnational character and caters to multinational audiences. Using insights drawn from a number of academic disciplines, the authors in this wide-ranging volume consider the implications of a region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles in the production of movies, music, comics, and animation. They also investigate the regional economics of transcultural production, considering cultural imaginaries in the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural goods and images. Where scholarship on popular culture conventionally explores the "meaning" of texts, Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia draws on empirical studies of the culture industries of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, and use a regional framework to analyze the consequences of co-production and collaboration.

Published by: NUS Press Pte Ltd

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The idea for this volume germinated during an international workshop held at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University on 10 and 11 December 2008. The workshop examined the production systems of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia that have recently emerged. It did so through...

1. Introduction: History and Theory in the Study of Cultural Collaboration

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pp. 1-25

Let us begin with four pictures: first, a multinational action movie being financed by producers from Hong Kong and filmed in Mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia or Thailand; second, a housewife from the Philippines watching a Korean family drama on TV; third, a group of Indonesian fans translating...

Regionalization Processes and Features

2. Popular Culture and Regionalization in East and Southeast Asia

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pp. 29-51

Throughout most of the twentieth century, Asia was a relatively divided continent.¹ In terms of regional formation, the term “Asia” itself was not much more than a matter of nomenclature, which merely indicated the continent’s geographic location. Previous attempts to promote solidarity among Asians did...

3. Korean Cinema Industry and Cinema Regionalization in East Asia

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pp. 52-67

In some sense, international cultural flow in the twentieth century was colored by fear and antagonism.¹ This is because the idea of cultural flow was considered an ancillary to cultural imperialism, which saw the global culture to be dominated by Western — the U.S. in particular — cultural products through transnational...

4. Regional Contexts of Cooperation and Collaboration in Hong Kong Cinema

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pp. 68-96

The Hong Kong film industry has often been described and analyzed in terms of transnationalism and globalization, and the conjoined categories of “global” and “local.”¹ In this essay, we identify the conceptual limits of these perspectives and argue in favor of the salience of “region” as a unit of analysis...

Mechanisms of Co-production and Collaboration

5. Cooking Outside the Box: What Can Rice Cookers Tell Us about Cross-Cultural Collaborations?

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pp. 99-114

Hong Kong has been Japan’s gateway to Asian markets for nearly six decades.¹ When Japan Airlines launched Japan’s inaugural international commercial service in 1954, Hong Kong became its first Asian destination. The free port was, and remains, an Asian transportation hub, facilitating the formal...

6. Re-nationalizing the Transnational? The Cases of Exiled and Warlords in Hong Kong–China Film Co-production

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pp. 115-135

The increasingly intensified transnational circulation of films across (East) Asia has not only made co-production a more realizable option, but also a growing imperative, as film companies are facing keener competition for entry and domination in Asian film markets. While co-production offers various...

7. Transnational K-Pop Machine Searching for “Asian” Model through Crossbreeding?

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pp. 136-149

Though it is no longer fashionable to speak of the “Korean Wave,” the term commonly used to denote the diffusion and consumption of Korean pop cultural products across the East and Southeast regions of Asia, it cannot be denied that the growth of Korean cultural industries is regarded as one of the...

8. Niche Globality: Philippine Media Texts to the World

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pp. 150-168

Media — film, television, music, and the internet — are transnational artifacts and sites of transnational negotiations. The introduction of cinema to the Philippines, for instance, from France and the U.S., marked a process of acculturation and adaptation of foreign technology in the new frontier...

Circumventing Nationality and the State

9. Regionalism and National Dis-integration: Li Ying’s Yasukuni and the Co-creation of East Asia

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pp. 171-184

As in postwar Europe, the future of regionalism and regionalization in East Asia are linked to the progress of historical reconciliation, and the ability and willingness of East Asians to think, act, and feel beyond the narrow confines of cultural nationalism. While academic analyses of Asian regionalism often dwell...

10. Master Q, Kung Fu Heroes and the Peranakan Chinese: Asian Pop Cultures in New Order Indonesia

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pp. 185-206

Let me begin with what I have gathered from my casual survey of the current Northeast Asian (mainly Japanese and Korean) pop culture in Indonesia.¹ The CDs of Hamasaki Ayumi and Utada Hikaru have only been available in Indonesia since 2004. Korean pop star Rain (Hoon Jung Ji) just appeared...

11. Chinese Subtitle Groups and the Neoliberal Work Ethic

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pp. 207-232

Th is paper is dedicated to the anonymous heroes and heroines toiling away for Chinese subtitle groups.¹ Most of them are based in mainland China, but a few can be found in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinesespeaking communities around the world. These fansubbers volunteer to convert non-Chinese...

CONTRIBUTORS

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pp. 233-236

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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pp. 237-259

INDEX

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pp. 260-276

E-ISBN-13: 9789971696252
Print-ISBN-13: 9789971696009

Page Count: 350
Illustrations: 6 images
Publication Year: 2012

Edition: New