Younghan Cho
Over the past few decades, East Asian pop culture has drawn a tremendous amount of attention from not only regional producers and audiences but also academia: many scholars from Asia and the West have contributed to the ongoing debates and discussions on this topic. It is particularly noteworthy that Asian cultural studies scholars have been conducting their research in the cities in which they live, based on their own experiences and those of their neighbors. The volume and diversity of these experiences and discussions suggest that it is an opportune time to conduct broader and more theoretical research on East Asian pop culture. As Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chua Beng Huat suggest, we need to “work longer, further and deeper” (2007, 5) in order to better understand East Asian pop culture and its significance as one of the major inter-Asian trends.
This chapter aims to historicize East Asian pop culture by tracing regional flows of pop culture, from Hong Kong films and Japanese animation, dramas, and pop music in the 1980s and 1990s to the Korean Wave and the emergence of Pop Culture China in the twenty-first century. Rather than describing the genres, artists, and other innumerable historical details that make up the pop cultures of East Asia, the primary purpose here is to develop a historical narrative of East Asian pop culture vis-à-vis its influences, both American and those internal to the region. I suggest understanding East Asian pop culture as a series of regional flows of popular culture, which I will call “pop flows.” Constructed through consuming, copying, and referencing both American and regional pop cultures, pop flows help us to articulate East Asian pop culture as both the historical accumulation and temporal coexistence of these diverse influences. Finally, the chapter attempts to delineate a distinctive element of East Asian pop culture, which I refer to as “double inscription.”
In historicizing East Asian popular culture, I am particularly interested in raising fundamental questions about cultural theory and building new conceptual frameworks to address those questions. Rather than applying Western-oriented concepts to East Asia, I attempt to develop an alternative framework through historicizing regional cultural experiences, based mainly on assessments and explications of critics in the region.1 As Chen has contended, “What we need are rather alternative frameworks for reference. … The emergence of an inter-Asian public sphere … would be the beginning of that shift and multiplication of our frames of reference” (2001, 86–87). In tracing the history of East Asian pop culture, this study revisits questions such as “Can we overcome the dichotomy between Western theory and Asian reality?” and “Can Asia be the location of theory?” (Shih 2010, 471).
The articulation of East Asian pop culture needs to be accompanied by a set of empirical questions unique to each country, each locale, each group, and each genre of pop cultures under consideration, but framing this research as “East Asian” makes it inherently comparative in nature. Furthermore, it is
impossible for the comparative study of all active consumption processes across different objects and times of analysis to be undertaken by a single scholar who is able to traverse not only national-spatial boundaries but also cultural linguistic barriers across the whole of East Asia.
(Chua and Cho 2012, 489)
Collaborative research efforts, especially inter-Asian academic efforts, are essential for the discursive construction of East Asian pop culture as an object of analysis and theorization (Chua 2004). Along with the other empirically based essays in this anthology, this study seeks to contribute to the ongoing critical and theoretical engagement with the complexity of East Asian pop culture. Therefore, this project aims not only at historicizing East Asian pop culture through regional pop flows, but also at reconsidering salient aspects of modern East Asia by using pop culture as an entry point.
This section briefly sketches America’s influence on Asian pop culture during the second half of the 20th century. After World War II, America “crafted its regional strategic influence partly through the promotion of cultural understanding of America” (Chua and Cho 2012, 485). One aspect of this new strategic initiative was the dissemination of American popular culture throughout the region. American pop culture was not only well received and quickly absorbed by Asian consumers, but it was also appropriated by cultural producers in East Asia. Examples range from Hollywood’s influence on Asian filmmaking to the impact of American rock ’n’ roll on Asian popular music. Even today, the Americanness of East Asian pop culture is a “constant source of public discourse in Asia, with reference to the effects of ‘Westernization’ and ‘cultural contamination’ of the local” (Chua 2008, 74). The degrees of Americanization have varied in different parts of the region as well as over time, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was impossible not to recognize the American origins of East Asian pop cultures. Nearly every expression of pop culture in East Asia was influenced by the aura of America as the symbol of the modern or superior Other.
At the same time that East Asian nations were establishing their independence in the immediate postwar period, American hegemony was becoming a prevalent and influential force in the region. During the following three decades, the world was plunged into the Cold War— although it was anything but “cold” in Asia with the Korean War in the early 1950s—and the Vietnam War of 1958–1974. According to the prevailing Cold War logic, the struggles of these and other Asian countries to establish political and economic sovereignty and form new national identities were predicated on continued economic growth and resistance to Communism. Under such conditions, it is no surprise that America, a colonialist superpower, was both directly and indirectly engaged in cultural politics in East Asia, particularly through the use of anti-communist propaganda (Chen 2001).2
During the Cold War era, pop cultures in East Asia became contested realms in which American interests both co-opted and clashed with national governments in the region. Initially, the region’s pop cultures were officially supported because they efficiently disseminated anti-communist propaganda (Yoshimi 2003).3 Under the supervision of the ongoing American military presence, and often with its direct financial support, many governments installed broadcasting and entertainment systems that were crucial both in propagandizing anti-communist ideas and in building national ideologies. From the start, these systems embraced American formats, programs, operating rationales, and so on. Moreover, because of the obvious American origin of these technologies and cultural products, they were treated as symbols of modern life or modern style (Yoshimi 2006). In the process of nation-building, therefore, national governments in the region actively embraced American-flavored pop cultures, and these were in turn welcomed and enjoyed by the East Asian general public.
As pop culture became more prevalent in people’s everyday lives, however, the same national governments became wary of the sexual, individualistic, and even liberal ideologies that they believed were spread as a consequence of various American pop-cultural influences (Chua and Cho 2012). Their concerns included exposure to immorality, sexuality, violence, and progressive political ideas. Therefore, pop culture was also decried across East Asia as evidence of the decay of each society’s moral and ethical standards, and it was often regarded as a threat to the authority of the government. Thus, in East Asia, America often “serve[d] as a metaphorical siren song against which a balanced economy must seal its ears” (Garon and Maclachlan 2006, 14). Such patronizing government attitudes collided with the populist approach of local consumers. This conflict reveals the complexity of the connections between East Asian pop cultures and Americanization, and it can also be used to trace the expansion of American hegemony during the nation-building stages of many Asian countries.
After seventy years of steady interaction with the local, this penetration of American pop culture into both the production and consumption sides of the East Asian pop cultural space has become almost seamless—as seen most recently in the domination of American television formats in East Asian television. In this regard, Anthony Fung suggests the idea of global (dis) continuity to describe “the degree of continuity of the modes and structures of operation of transnational cultural corporations, which conventionally dominate in the transplant from West to Asia in which local adaptations and modifications arise” (2013, 2). As the world of mass entertainment has become globalized and national boundaries have become more porous, the status of American pop culture in East Asia has been transformed. No longer curious and new—or degenerate and corrosive—American music, films, and television are now seen as cultural products to be actively mimicked, appropriated, and even banalized. The result is that today it is often difficult to discern the boundaries of American influence in East Asian pop cultures (Chua and Cho 2012). Nonetheless, it is still true that East Asians recognize, either implicitly or explicitly, both the direct and indirect influence of American culture on Asian pop cultures (Ang 2004).4
Since the early 1990s, East Asian cultural landscapes have been significantly transformed through increased integration, networking, and cooperation among various elements of the transnational cultural industries, including non-Western players. Such transformations engender both drastic and subtle reconfigurations within the pop cultures of East Asia: the “structure of transnational cultural power has been dispersed, but has also become more solid and ubiquitous” (Iwabuchi 2004, 6). Previously, East Asian audiences tended to prefer American pop cultural products to domestic or regional ones. However, so many elements of American pop culture have been so effectively routinized and integrated into East Asian cultural products and the everyday lives of people in East Asia that it is hard to discern the extent of American pop culture’s influence on local or regional pop cultures. Such transformations in the East Asian cultural landscapes have encouraged scholars to seriously grapple with the new configurations of East Asian pop culture vis-à-vis American influence. Chua comments, “the emergent reality of an East Asian pop culture is juxtaposed against the presence of Hollywood and other media cultures” (2008, 89). As such, it is still worthwhile to examine to what extent American pop culture is still influencing the burgeoning growth and flows of East Asian pop cultures that in recent decades have become part of the globalization of mass entertainment.
The strengthening of regional pop cultures in East Asia can be observed in terms of both production and consumption. The Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s “has not stopped intra-flows but has instead furthered the interaction and intra-flows among Asian nations” (Iwabuchi, Muecke, and Thomas 2004, 1). With regional trends being expedited by advancements in transportation and telecommunications technologies, East Asian audiences can almost instantly consume a wide variety of regional cultural products (Hu 2005). Notable regional flows include the extensive pan-Asian popularity of Hong Kong films from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Japanese pop culture in the 1990s, and South Korean pop culture, dubbed the Korean Wave, in the first decade of the 2000s.
The 1980s were the heyday of the Hong Kong film industry. Hong Kong films, particularly noir films, gained popularity not only from pan-Asian audiences but also fans on the other continents. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam attribute the global acclaim of Hong Kong noir films to the filmmakers, commenting that the vision of Hong Kong noir films “comes from postmodern Asia, not postwar America” (2007, 7).5 However, the success of the Hong Kong film industry “was tinged over with anxiety about the fact that Great Britain had agreed to relinquish sovereignty over the city to the People’s Republic of China in 1997” (Curtin 2013, 254). While the golden days of the Hong Kong film industry slowly waned as audiences in overseas markets did not develop affection for most films produced in the decade following the handover (ibid.), Hong Kong cinema still continues to exert its influence and demand its due respect.
Japanese pop culture in the form of animation, television drama, and J-pop dominated pan-Asian cultural circulation and consumption in the 1990s. Japanese cultural hegemony in East Asia was a result of both its economic prowess and the growing involvement of Asian countries in the global capitalist economy (Ching 1994). This spread of Japanese popular culture went hand in hand with the globalization of Japanese brands in durable goods (e.g. Sony’s Walkman), non-durable goods (fast-moving consumer goods), and cosmetics (Oyama 2009). Shinji Oyama suggests that the pan-Asian advertising of Japanese brands was the visible sign of the emergence of a regional commonality or sensibility, which was shaped mainly by Japanese media content (ibid.). The wide popularity of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s “precipitates (asymmetric) connections between people in Japan and those in modernized (or rapidly modernizing) ‘Asia’ … through popular cultural forms” (Iwabuchi 2002, 18).6
From the late 1990s, South Korean pop products had begun to draw significant regional audiences, a phenomenon referred to as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu in Korean. TV soap operas or melodramas led the expansion of the Korean Wave in Asia: Winter Sonata (2002) was a sensation among Japanese audiences and Jewel in the Palace (2003) made “the greatest impact on all the ethnic-Chinese locations in East Asia” (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008, p. 5). Later, the development of digital media forms has played a primary role in expanding “digital Hallyu,” in particular, “YouTube is a driving force of K-pop today” (Kim 2013, 8). John Lie suggests that “K-pop exemplifies middle class, urban and suburban values” and K-pop performers “exemplify a sort of pop perfectionism: catchy tunes, good singing, attractive bodies, cool clothes, mesmerizing movements in a non-threatening, pleasant package” (2012, 356). The Korean Wave is not only another (export) brand that is orchestrated with much support from the Korean government, transnational corporations, and pop-nationalism among South Koreans ( Joo 2011; Lie 2012),7 but also “a multi-directional flow and a highly interactive ongoing process that is created, and possibly sustained, by digitally empowered fan consumers” (Kim 2013, 14).
These regional flows of popular culture have been washing across East Asia for decades, but “Pop Culture China” has only recently entered the East Asian pop culture scene. Here, Pop Culture China is discussed as having two distinct communities of producers and consumers. Pop Culture China can first be described as “the dense flow of cultural economic exchanges between geographically dispersed Chinese populations” (Chua 2011, 114; 2012). According to Olivia Khoo, the cultural community of Pop Culture China can be “formed through the circulation and consumption of popular culture among dispersed Chinese populations” (2014, 729). Particular entertainers and Chinese-language films (e.g. Wong Kar-Wai’s films) are traversing geographical spaces in the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and beyond. Pop Culture China can also be understood as enhanced by the PRC’s “growing influence over the production and flow of screen media” (Curtin 2010, 117). China’s rise to the regional and global stage was emphatically shown during the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which were directed by the state’s favored filmmaker, Zhang Yimou (Curtin 2010, 2013). The PRC’s cultural policymakers “are hoping that the next cultural wave will be one from China— one that will gain China’s status as the cultural core of Asia,” but its future still remains unclear (Keane and Liu, 2013). Its status has been enhanced by the growing importance of mainland China as a consumer of cultural products. For example, it currently ranks as the second largest market for U.S. films. Nonetheless, mainland Chinese pop culture “still occupies a different realm from ‘our’ East Asian (post)modernity” because it “has not yet mastered globalized styles” (Iwabuchi 2010, 151).
The long succession of East Asian pop trends indicates that American pop culture is no longer the single or even the primary reference point in the region. In emphasizing that the reign of the singularity of American cultural products has been broken, Chen (2001) points out that American mass cultural products are only some among a range of choices available to young people in Asia. The increasing number of cultural references internal to East Asia has resulted in the creation of hybrid cultural products in the region, influenced by Asian as well as American pop culture.
The considerable volume and wide circulation of pop flows within the region is clearly indicative of changes in cultural tastes and trends in East Asia. People who were once not only separated by national and linguistic borders but were also more or less indifferent to each other now enjoy the same pop cultures; in turn, both the content of their cultural products and the experience of consuming them at roughly the same time without regard to national borders enable these people to know each other better and to better imagine each other’s communities. In his exploration of Japan’s consumption of Hong Kong and Korean cultural products, Koichi Iwabuchi (2008) observes that the two-way flows of popular culture have helped people notice human faces and recognize the attractiveness of their cultural neighbors. These regional flows of pop culture both reflect and promote specific kinds of connectivity and sharedness among people in East Asia. The enthusiastic reception of the drama-mediated representations of people in Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea, for example, signals a sense of coevalness among Asian audiences, a common orientation that constitutes cultural proximity (Cho 2011; Iwabuchi 2002, 2004).
The decades-long development of popular culture in East Asia outlined in the previous section suggests that it is a substantial and cohesive entity. As a way of articulating its particular historical narrative, I suggest reframing East Asian popular culture as a mélange of recurring regional pop flows. East Asian popular culture as a mélange of iterations describes both a series of regional pop flows and their simultaneous juxtaposition. In a previous study on the Korean Wave in East Asia, I suggest reframing the Korean Wave as an iteration of East Asian pop culture (Cho 2011). Building on Paul Gilroy’s uses of iteration (1993, 1996), I further contend that iteration refers to recurrent streams or variant flows from the same (or the base), but, at the same time, it is something more than simple repetition. Following this reasoning, I suggest interpreting “the Korean Wave as an iteration of [East Asian pop culture], rather than an invariant repetition of Korean culture, a unique phenomenon, or a derivative substitute for Western pop culture” (2011, 388). The Korean Wave, as an iteration of East Asian pop culture, shares similar or common elements with previous regional flows, such as Hong Kong films and Japanese dramas. The concept of iteration “acknowledges the mutual borrowing of East Asian pop culture historically while conceding the presence of national difference, even though this borrowing is uneven” (Yang 2012, 421). It enables the Korean Wave to be understood in the context of—and connected to—other pan-Asian cultural phenomena.
Such a perspective is valuable for several reasons. First, the historical narrative expands our understanding of the American pop culture influence on East Asian pop culture. The Korean Wave, for example, reflects not only regional pop flows but also American influence, but it should not be seen as a simple copy of its precedents. For instance, Girls’ Generation, a very popular K-pop idol group, has included distinctively American elements in its melodies, choreography, and costumes in its recent albums such as I Got a Boy (2013) and Mr.Mr. (2014), while it had a very cute, or kawaii, style for its debut in 2007. The historical narrative enables us to avoid the theoretical conundrum of regarding any regional pop flow either as a unique phenomenon or as a simple imitation of its Western counterpart. Any effort to fully explain East Asian pop culture must consider the long-term continuances and interactions of American and regional pop cultural products. This historical narrative explicates how regional pop flows as iteration “contribute to the historicity as well as the multiplicity of East Asian pop culture” (Cho 2011, 388).
Second, the historical narrative provides a useful perspective on the concept of iteration, which in turn highlights the temporal coexistence among regional pop flows. As I outlined in the previous sections, American pop culture, Hong Kong films, Japanese dramas, and the Korean Wave have undergone periods of ebb and flow on the main stage of East Asian pop culture since the 1950s. However, it needs to be noted that such a narrative does not necessarily imply that one cultural trend completely replaced its predecessor. Hong Kong films, which enjoyed their prime in the 1980s, are still able to sporadically attract large regional audiences, and their inventive style and narrative structures inspired works that were part of later regional trends. For instance, the Hong Kong film Internal Affairs (2002), which “enjoyed widespread success in many East Asian countries” (Choi 2010, 146), was noted for its influence on the character, plot, and main struggles of the Korean film New World (2013). Framing regional pop flows as iterations highlights the historical genealogy as well as the contemporary overlap among regional pop flows. Such temporal coexistence can be found in the traces of American influence in current regional pop products. In this sense, East Asia can be described as a cultural quilt of various regional pop cultures. Such an articulation of East Asian pop culture as a mélange of iterations highlights the multiplicity and reciprocity in East Asian pop culture.
Third, this historical perspective stands in opposition to those demonizing the East Asian audiences who enjoy regional pop flows. At first glance, such a stigmatization is no longer taken for granted in current trends in postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and even globalization studies, which usually advocate agency and oppositional reading by local critics and audiences. Considering the endemic popularity of regional pop flows, however, it is no surprise to encounter some concerned voices. Local cultural critics in East Asia are often extremely sensitive to and concerned about cultural influences from neighboring countries. To spare East Asian audiences from such elitist views, my historical articulation of East Asian pop culture does not passively avoid concepts such as Americanization and acculturation. Rather, it underscores the multiple origins of and mutual borrowing among regional pop cultures, and it treats American pop culture as any other pop flow, which is to say, as one of the cornerstones of East Asian pop culture. The same understanding can be applied to the process of consuming culture. Due to the multiple origins and mutual borrowings inherent in East Asian popular culture, it is not necessarily true that East Asian people who enjoy Japanese pop culture would become acculturated to Japanese thinking, morals, and consciousness, that is, become Japanese. While East Asian audiences enjoy Korean pop songs, Hong Kong films, or Japanese dramas, they may also perceive the recurring, the shared, and the familiar but also the unique, the different, and the strange. The attributes of historical accumulation and coexistence among regional pop flows, unwittingly or not, serve to attract regional attention and popularity in various parts of East Asia. This historical approach perceives East Asian pop culture as unfettered by a dichotomist approach, which draws simplistic comparisons between the local and global—or even the local and regional—cultural spheres.
Regional pop flows promote mutual knowledge across distances, extend reciprocal understanding across national borders, and provide people with the opportunity to experience a common consumerism and a common fandom. Through sharing regional cultural products, people in East Asia can recognize both the differences and similarities among diverse regional pop flows. According to C.J. Wee Wan-ling, “the circulation of culture and cultural products is tied up with the concerns of East Asian commonalities and differences, past and present” (2012, 203). Although regional cultural flows are still asymmetric in East Asia, they contribute to increasing the overall cultural diversity of the region by expanding the number of contact zones and strengthening the multiplicity and reciprocity of East Asian pop cultures. Increasing inter-Asian cultural flows and actual encounters “have become sources for articulating new notions of Asian cultural commonality, difference, and asymmetry” (Cho 2011, 394). In particular, the iterative nature of regional pop flows inevitably forms the regional distinctiveness of East Asian pop culture. In this section, I suggest the term “double inscription” to describe the distinctive cultural logic of East Asian pop culture.
Here, I refer to double inscription as a condition in which the global is always and already in the national and the regional. For instance, the success of Korean pop culture in East Asia demonstrates that global culture, which is one of the elements within the Korean Wave, is already embedded in regional tastes, for example, middle-aged urban women who enjoy Korean dramas. Difference and sameness among various regional pop flows become resources for imagining un/familiar intimacy and dis/coevality among regional audiences in different countries. As I have argued in a previous work, East Asian audiences recognize the Confucian themes and elements in Korean dramas, but, simultaneously, find them very odd, a frame of mind I call defamiliarized intimacy (Cho 2011, 396). The coexistence of different dimensions (such as Confucian elements in very modern and urban settings) in East Asian pop culture elicits “feeling of unexpected pleasure and empathy from regional audiences” (ibid., 396). In this vein, we can suppose that East Asian pop culture “does connect people in the distance crisscrossing the world, evenly and unevenly, intimately and indifferently, friendly and discordantly” (Iwabuchi 2004, 20).
However, double inscription does not suggest that the national, regional, and global are equal, nor does it imply that their relationships or hierarchies are predetermined. In their collected studies on East Asian pop culture, Chua and Iwabuchi point out that “East Asian pop culture development, especially of TV dramas, is one of uneven and unequal flows and exchanges across national and cultural boundaries” (2008, 4). Furthermore, in East Asian pop culture, we still observe the “tendency of audiences to assume a ‘national identity-culture’ as a mainframe from which to identify/distance themselves from onscreen characters and actions” (Chua 2008, 85). Moreover, national boundary and sovereignty issues are still intensely disputed in East Asia, which reminds us not to take popularly circulated ideas such as free trade, the demise of the nation state, or the rise of cosmopolitanism for granted. Such a condition not only implies that the national still functions as the main framework, but also reveals that it is necessary to go beyond the national framework when considering East Asian pop culture.
Double inscription further indicates the presence of a regional orientation toward and desire for global modernity and capitalism. Many Asian countries have been simultaneously undergoing very compressed forms of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. As Chua suggests, the enthusiastic popular reception of regional pop products in Asia signals that “Asians from different locations may share a similar orientation towards capitalist-consumerist modernity” (2008, 81). East Asian pop culture as a modern form of contemporaneity has been made possible by the economic growth in Asian countries as well as by a regional emphasis on middle-class lives and urban settings. Wee notes that “contemporary East Asia is located inside capitalist modernity,” and goes on to identify capitalist modernization, modern culture, and intense urbanization as “major defining feature[s] of the New East Asia” (2012, 197–198). In its current configuration, therefore, contemporaneity—different but equal—along capitalist modern temporality is embedded into many pop flows of East Asian pop culture (Chua 2008). In doing so, double inscription reveals the ongoing, uneven competition among the national, the regional, and the global rather than less nuanced approaches that place the global and the local in dichotomous opposition (Mackintosh et al. 2009).8
The framework proposed here is committed to illuminating the perpetual co-optation, negotiation, and competition among national cultures, regional desires for modernization, and the omnipresent influence of American pop culture. Thus, the theoretical work not only embraces the complex, dynamic potency of living memory among regional audiences, but also demonstrates the mutability of East Asian sensibilities, which are always unfinished and always being formed through interaction with their own and other regional pop cultures.
In this chapter, I historicized East Asian pop culture by delineating a series of independent but nonetheless linked regional pop cultures and by describing the region’s distinctive cultural logic. Because East Asian pop culture has materialized by different degrees in different regional spaces and periods through engagement with specific national circumstances, regional flows, and global influences, it is an excellent space for examining these complex entanglements. The task of historicizing East Asian pop culture, along with more concrete studies, will contribute to constructing East Asian pop culture self-referentially.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest further tasks for scholars of Asian cultural studies in the global system of knowledge production. First, the historical narrative enables us to transcend the “West–the Rest” paradigm, in which Asian pop culture has been understood as an object either assimilating, opposing, or even hybridizing global (i.e. American) pop culture.9 Under the “West–the Rest” paradigm, it is impossible to contemplate Asia without imposing Euro–American centrism (Dirlik 2000). In many studies of pop cultures, unfortunately, it is also true that “we still tend to think of global-local interactions by how the non-West responds to the West and to neglect how the non-West countries ‘rework’ modernities” (Iwabuchi, Mueche, and Thomas 2004, 9). By contrast, the historical perspective invalidates the question of whether Asian pop cultures are either imitations or subversive appropriations of American pop culture. Instead, historical narratives demonstrate that East Asian pop culture is neither antithetical to nor a reproduction of American pop culture, but rather is constructed inside a culturally imagined regional boundary within which historical memories and modernizing desires are shared across national borders (Cho 2011). In particular, the idea of double inscription makes clear that the distinctive nature of East Asian pop culture has been constructed through its continuing responses to Euro-American modernity as well as through its continuing interactions with contemporaneous Asian modernities. Conceptualizations such as iteration and double inscription are attempts “to scatter the majoritarian dichotomy of the West (theory) and the Rest (Asia) in order to account for the multiplicity of power/knowledge formation on variegated scales” (Shih 2010, 467).
Finally, the historical narrative compels us to recognize the increasing importance and richness of inter-Asian referencing in East Asian pop culture. Such a consciously historical approach enables scholars of Asian cultural studies to juxtapose the differences and similarities of cultural phenomena both in horizontal and diachronic dimensions, as Iwabuchi argues in the next chapter. Rather than treating regional pop cultures as mere cases or applying Western theories to them, inter-Asian referencing heralds the de-Westernization of academia in East Asia. Such a recognition in East Asian pop culture would be a significant confirmation of Chen and Chua’s claim that scholars of Asian culture have begun to break free from “West-oriented singularity and to multiply frames of reference and sites for identification” (2007, 1). Historicizing East Asian pop culture not only contributes to our knowledge of East Asian pop culture based on our empirical experiences, but also generates alternative frameworks for the many debates and discussions that those experiences engender. Meanwhile, “the emergence of strong centers of Cultural Studies outside the usual Anglo-American world … challenge[s] the hegemonic position of Western voices speaking authoritatively about Asia, and challenge[s] the epistemological assumptions” (Dutton 2009, 37). It is my hope that this and the other chapters collected in this handbook continue to contribute to pluralizing both media studies and cultural studies and to deconstructing the global division of intellectual labor.
1 For much of the history of Asian Studies, “Asia has not been considered the location or producer of theory,” and “it has become customary for scholars to apply Western theory to Asian reality or Asian texts” (Shih 2010, 467). Such a situation is also witnessed in Allen Chun’s story: “I have been to too many conferences in Asia where ‘we’ Asians complain incessantly about the fact that we are relegated to the role of local area specialist, while Western area specialists are considered theorists” (2008, 705).
2 Chen (2001) suggests there was a direct relationship between the older, traditional kind of colonialism and the new Cold War structures that came into existence in Asia after 1945.
3 For example, in the everyday consciousness of South Koreans, America became associated with anti-communism (Yoshimi 2003).
4 In discussing the cultural intimacy of TV drama, Ang similarly suggests that “in global terms TV drama since Dallas has not, despite Lang’s fear, become more Americanized”: there has been a “standardization of format and formula … but narrative content tends to be locally inflected and locally produced, using local actors, local idioms and local locations” (2004, 304).
5 Similarly, Meaghan Morris suggests that Hong Kong action films “do not solely derive from the West,” but their industrial and aesthetic imaginings flow “toward and through Western cinemas as well as around the region itself” (2007, 427).
6 Iwabuchi (2004) states that Japanese contemporary culture might have activated cultural exchange and mutual understanding among youth in East/Southeast Asia on a larger scale than has ever been previously observed.
7 Jeongsuk Joo defines pop nationalism in South Korea as “an attempt to appropriate transnationalizing Korean pop culture in a way that celebrates the nation and asserts its cultural prominence” (2011, 500).
8 While suggesting approaching the key concepts of the global and the local as an ongoing cultural negotiation, Jonathan Mackintosh, Chris Berry, and Nicola Liscutin assert that “the global is always/already local” (2009, 8).
9 Utilizing Chen and Spivak’s work, Jini Kim Watson attempts to “undo the bilateralism between the West and non-West,” and further suggests to “open up space for inter-Asian, or south-south, analyses of modernity that no longer need the West for validation” (2011, 254).
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