Asian popular culture

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book examines different aspects of Asian popular culture, including films, TV, music, comedy, folklore, cultural icons, the Internet and theme parks. It raises important questions such as - What are the implications of popularity of Asian popular culture for globalization? Do regional forces impede the globalizing of cultures? Or does the Asian popular culture flow act as a catalyst or conveying channel for cultural globalization? Does the globalization of culture pose a threat to local culture? It addresses two seemingly contradictory and yet parallel processes in the circulation of Asian popular culture: the interconnectedness between Asian popular culture and western culture in an era of cultural globalization that turns subjects such as Pokémon, Hip Hop or Cosmopolitan into truly global phenomena, and the local derivatives and versions of global culture that are necessarily disconnected from their origins in order to cater for the local market. It thereby presents a collective argument that, whilst local social formations, and patterns of consumption and participation in Asia are still very much dependent on global cultural developments and the phenomena of modernity, yet such dependence is often concretized, reshaped and distorted by the local media to cater for the local market.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Contributors (p. x)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiv)
• 1 Introduction: Asian popular culture: the global (dis)continuity (p. 1)
• Part I The dominance of global continuity: cultural localization and adaptation (p. 19)
• 2 When Chinese youth meet Harry Potter: translating consumption and middle-class identification (p. 21)
• 3 One region, two modernities: Disneyland in Tokyo and Hong Kong (p. 42)
• 4 Comic travels: Disney publishing in the People's Republic of China (p. 59)
• 5 Saving face for magazine covers: new forms of transborder visuality in urban China (p. 76)
• 6 Cultural consumption and masculinity: a case study of GQ magazine covers in Taiwan (p. 94)
• Part II Global discontinuity: the local absorption of global culture (p. 111)
• 7 An unlocalized and unglobalized subculture: English language independent music in Singapore (p. 113)
• 8 "Only mix, never been cut": the localized production of Jamaican music in Thailand (p. 139)
• 9 Popular online games in the Taiwanese market: an examination of the relationships of media globalization and local media consumption (p. 154)
• 10 The rise of the Korean cinema in inbound and outbound globalization (p. 172)
• Part III Cultural domestication: a new form of global continuity (p. 195)
• 11 Pocket capitalism and virtual intimacy: Pokémon as a symptom of post-industrial youth culture (p. 197)
• 12 Playing the global game: Japan brand and globalization (p. 213)
• Part IV China as a rising market: cultural antagonism and globalization (p. 231)
• 13 China's new creative strategy: the utilization of cultural soft power and new markets (p. 233)
• 14 Renationalizing Hong Kong cinema: the gathering force of the mainland market (p. 250)
• Index (p. 267)