Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture

Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture PDF Author: Beng Huat Chua
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture

Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture PDF Author: Beng Huat Chua
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888139037
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

East Asian Pop Culture

East Asian Pop Culture PDF Author: Beng Huat Chua
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622098923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The contributors analyse the subject of Asian pop culture arranged under three headings: 'Television Industry in East Asia', 'Transnational-Crosscultural Receptions of TV Dramas' and 'Nationalistic reactions'.

Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols

Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols PDF Author: Maud Lavin
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888390805
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer in this digital, globalist age. The title of this pioneering volume, Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan already gives an idea of the colorful, multifaceted realms the fans inhabit today. Contributors to this collection situate the proliferation of (often online) queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires as a reaction against the norms in discourses surrounding nation-states, linguistics, geopolitics, genders, and sexualities. Moving beyond the easy polarities between general resistance and capitulation, Queer Fan Cultures explores the fans’ diverse strategies in negotiating with cultural strictures and media censorship. It further outlines the performance of subjectivity, identity, and agency that cyberspace offers to female fans. Presenting a wide array of concrete case studies of queer fandoms in Chinese-speaking contexts, the essays in this volume challenge long-established Western-centric and Japanese-focused fan scholarship by highlighting the significance and specificities of Sinophone queer fan cultures and practices in a globalized world. The geographic organization of the chapters illuminates cultural differences and the other competing forces shaping geocultural intersections among fandoms based in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. “This important collection complicates our understanding of fan practices, showing how national and regional factors play an important role in how media texts and identities are understood. It also shows how the Chinese-speaking world is home to dense and often conflicting modes of audience reception of cultural texts deriving from Sinophone, Japanese, and Western contexts.” —Mark McLelland, University of Wollongong “An exciting anthology by a talented group of emergent scholars whose vibrant studies offer fresh insights on the diverse practices and transregional flows of queer fandom in the Chinese-speaking world. Local in its specificity and transnational in its scope, this book highlights the creativity of queer fan practices while critically locating them within the political and social structures that produce them.” —Helen Hok-Sze Leung, Simon Fraser University

Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption

Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption PDF Author: Sun Jung
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888028669
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures ù the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the pop-star Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid context, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. In the concluding chapter, the author also discusses recently emerging versatile masculinity within the transcultural pop production paradigm represented by K-pop idol boy bands.

Screening China's Soft Power

Screening China's Soft Power PDF Author: Paola Voci
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317209435
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Promoting China's cultural soft power by disseminating modern Chinese values is one of the policies of President Xi Jinping. Although, it is usually understood as a top-down initiative, implemented willingly or unwillingly by writers, filmmakers, artists, and so on, and often manifesting itself in clumsy and awkward ways, for example, the concept of "the Chinese dream," intended to rival and perhaps appeal more strongly than "the American dream," modern Chinese values are in fact put forward in many ways by many different cultural actors. Through analyses of film festivals, CCTV, Confucius Institutes, auteurs, blockbusters, reality TV, and online digital cultures, this book exposes the limitations of China's officially promoted soft power in both conception and practice, and proposes a pluralistic approach to understanding Chinese soft power in local, regional, and transnational contexts. As such, the book demonstrates the limitations of existing theories of soft power, and argues that the US-derived concept of soft power can benefit from being examined from a China perspective.

Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture

Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture PDF Author: Lu Chen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315414716
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
How can Japanese popular culture gain numerous fans in China, despite pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment? How is it that there’s such a strong anti-Korean sentiment in Chinese online fan communities when the official Sino-Korean relationship is quite stable before 2016? Avid fans in China are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding to make gifts to their idols in foreign countries. Tabloid reports on Japanese and Korean celebrities have been known to trigger nationalist protests in China. So, what is the relationship between Chinese fandom of Japanese and Korean popular culture and nationalist sentiment among Chinese youth? Chen discusses how Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean popular culture have formed their own nationalistic discourse since the 1990s. She argues that, as nationalism is constructed from various entangled ideologies, narratives, myths and collective memories, popular culture simply becomes another resource for the construction of nationalism. Fans thus actively select, interpret and reproduce the content of cultural products to suit their own ends. Unlike existing works, which focus on the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia, this book focuses on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience.

Transnational Convergence of East Asian Pop Culture

Transnational Convergence of East Asian Pop Culture PDF Author: Seok-Kyeong Hong
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000351335
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book observes and analyzes transnational interactions of East Asian pop culture and current cultural practices, comparing them to the production and consumption of Western popular culture and providing a theoretical discussion regarding the specific paradigm of East Asian pop culture. Drawing on innovative theoretical perspectives and grounded empirical research, an international team of authors consider the history of transnational flows within pop culture and then systematically address pop culture,digital technologies, and the media industry. Chapters cover the Hallyu—or Korean Wave—phenomenon, as well as Japanese and Chinese cultural industries. Throughout the book, the authors address the convergence of the once-separated practical, industrial, and business aspects of popular culture under the influence of digital culture. They further coherently synthesize a vast collection of research to examine the specific realities and practices of consumers that exist beyond regional boundaries, shared cultural identities, and historical constructs. This book will be of interest to academic researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students of Asian media, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, transcultural communication, or sociology.

Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism

Japanese Popular Culture and Contents Tourism PDF Author: Philip Seaton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315528673
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Contents tourism is tourism induced by the contents (narratives, characters, locations and other creative elements) of films, novels, games, manga, anime, television dramas and other forms of popular culture. Amidst the boom in global interest in Japanese popular culture, the utilization of popular culture to induce tourism domestically and internationally has been central to the "Cool Japan" strategy and, since 2005, government policy for local community revitalization. This book presents four main case studies of contents tourism: the phenomenon of "anime pilgrimage" to sites appearing in animated film; the travel behaviours and "pop-spiritualism" of female history fans to heritage sites; the collaboration between local community, fans and copyright holders that underpinned an anime-induced tourism boom in a small town north of Tokyo; and the large-scale economic impacts of tourism induced by NHK’s annual samurai period drama (Taiga Drama). It is the first major collection of articles published in English about media-induced tourism in Japan using the "contents tourism" approach. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers of media and tourism studies in Asia. This book was previously published as a special issue of Japan Forum.

Islands and Continents

Islands and Continents PDF Author: John Minford
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622098442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
From one of the most celebrated literary figures in Hong Kong comes this collection of short stories. Seeing Hong Kong through a kaleidoscope, the author poignantly represents Hong Kong through a variety of themes.

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest?

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? PDF Author: Ien Ang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317209583
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them. The contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the ‘hype’ that accompanies it, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; the second, to better understand how contemporary cultural diplomacy actually operates. In applying a cultural lens to the question, this book probes whether there can be such a thing as a cultural diplomacy ‘beyond the national interest’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.