I remember that, just before I presented this paper under its original title of “On the Usefulness of Media and Cultural Studies” at the conference in London, a friend of mine said, “Okay, you are presenting a paper on the uselessness of media and cultural studies.” While this was his misreading of the title, I realized it sounded more provocative and perhaps more accurately suggested what I was trying to convey — something about an emergent uneasy sense of doing critical media and cultural studies — and which I am feeling.

I have no intention of generalizing my own sense of frustration....

I want to discuss the radical potential of an Asian Cultural Studies. But, before I can do that, I must firstly address another question. Can one really even speak of an “Asian Cultural Studies”? After all, between the two fields of Asian Area Studies and the parallel universe that is Postcolonialism, there appears to be little geographic or theoretical room to constitute such a field. Despite this, that is precisely what appears to be happening with the emergence of journals such as positions, Traces and Inter-Asia, projects such as this one, and, perhaps most significantly, the emergence of strong centers...

In the life of nations, people address themselves and their collective identity in historically specific and changing ways. There are styles and registers with which people talk about themselves as a coherent group. Identities are addressed with certain valorized narratives and themes and legitimized with epistemologies under which people know themselves, and know that they know themselves. These ways of speaking about identity have a politics and a sociology, expressing changing social circumstances as the changing registers of national address.

In Taiwan, as its politics have transformed over fifty years, “theory” in forms such as Cultural Studies and postcoloniality has...

Since Venice under Mussolini, film festivals have played a significant role in introducing national film culture within a global exchange system. Enmeshed in a set of cultural politics aimed at promoting cultural diversity, they importantly help to brand films nationally and circulate them across the borders of the nation-state. Despite the growing interest and importance of film festivals as a scholarly topic, research has tended to focus on high-profile European festivals, such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. Little primary empirical research has been conducted to date on the subject of non-Western film festivals. As a result, the existing scholarship on...

In their study of how Hollywood’s global domination works, Miller et al. argue that exploitation of the “New International Division of Cultural Labour” (NICL) through foreign location production is a key mechanism of its hegemony. According to Miller et al., “Hollywood is global, in that it sells its wares in every nation, through a global system of copyright, promotion and distribution that uses the NICL to minimise costs and maximise revenue.”³ Hollywood thrives on the creative differences and cheap labor offered by foreign talent and location shooting.

Similarly, Goldsmith and O’Regan have investigated the development of a global infrastructure that...

Globalization is indeed on everybody’s lips and it may be the concept of our time, as quoted above. We are often told that the world is interconnected and operates interdependently in economic and political terms; technical developments have compressed time-distance,² so that the shrinking world is described as a “global village.” Consequently, there is a myth-like belief that homogeneous global culture is emerging.³ However closely interconnected the world seems, it is clear that globalization is not balanced or fair to everyone. Bauman clearly states that globalization can mean either “happiness” or “unhappiness” to different people.⁴ Indeed, globalization is a complicated...

Sharing and copying are two very fundamental human activities, but they face fierce opposition in today‘s knowledge economy, which is fueled by the privatization and the management of originality and creativity. In fact, the current knowledge economy exploits creativity not only as a commodity for profit but also as capital itself, making creativity, like labor and raw materials, a major factor in late-capitalist production. As a result, creativity is highly fetishized, and it is directly associated with wealth and power. Any activities that might diffuse the values of creativity, like sharing and copying, would be condemned. Creative industries have become...

For Marx, writing in the age of the manufacturing economy and imperialism, wealth appears as an immense accumulation of commodities.¹ Yet in the age of the information economy and globalization, wealth appears as an immense accumulation of brands. There should be little doubt that global brands have become one of the most visible signs of globalization. Powerful and ideologically charged images — such as the long queue for the first McDonald’s in Moscow or Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing (now closed) — seem to point in one irreversible direction: global homogenization. Or at least this is the image popular journalism...

Authenticity and nationality are closely linked for fans of South Korean¹ popular culture in China, as well for the Korean cultural establishment. Bringing gender into the equation, in this essay I focus on the mainly young female fans of Korean boy bands and idols. It was in 2000 that South Korean pop music became fashionable in China, as part of a regional phenomenon commonly dubbed “Korean Wave” (Hanliu in Chinese,Hallyu in Korean,² a pun on the meteorological homonym “cold current” ).³ Hanliu first arrived in China in 1997, brought through broadcasts of televised Korean soap operas, which were said to...

The year 2005 had been designated “Korea-Japan Friendship Year” by the Korean (ROK) and Japanese governments, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Various joint events and economic, sports, and cultural exchanges were meant to put a positive spin on ROK-Japan relations, which had grown rather tense in the nineties. By March 2005, however, as Shimane Prefecture’s assembly passed the “Takeshima Day” bill,¹ Korean protesters rallied around the Japanese Embassy in Seoul in response, and President Roh Moo Hyun declared that “Japanese foreign policy has reached an intolerable point,”² it became fairly...

In his recent reassessment of Italian neo-realist cinema, Mark Shiel has recalled that “one of the presumptions of the national cinema approach is that while films make an interesting object of study in themselves, their ultimate utility lies in the ways they produce a ‘collective narrative’ of a people and a national culture.” He goes on to note that “a balance must be struck between approaching . . . national cinema as a unitary phenomenon, the expression of a discrete and stable national culture, and recognising that on close analysis any national culture is bound to reveal itself to be...

Cultural Studies faces a crisis in Japan. About ten years have passed since it was “imported” from the United Kingdom following two key events: Tokyo University’s 1996 international conference that included five pioneering British scholars, including Stuart Hall,¹ and the publication by two leading academic journals, Shisō and Gendai Shisō, of a special issue on Cultural Studies. The term Cultural Studies has been acknowledged as a new interdisciplinary domain that draws on and brings together a wide variety of scholarly perspectives ranging from literary criticism to sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and media studies. It is true that much fruitful research...