Call for papers: Asian Pop Culture

The edited volume looks for contributors who can write on different aspects of Asian Popular Culture. For those who are interested, please contact Anthony Fung at anthonyfung@cuhk.edu.hk or email him an abstract by March 20, 2009


Asian Popular Culture: The Global Cultural (Dis)connection

edited by Anthony Fung
published by Routledge

Summary of the volume

This edited volume is a medium level textbook as well as a reference of Asian popular culture. Each chapter will be an in-depth concrete study of a particular phenomenon or process of popular culture in a city/ an area/ a country in Asia and all the chapters are connected by the common theme "The Global Cultural (Dis)connection." To serve as a textbook for senior undergraduate in classes (e.g. international communication, globalization and communication, popular culture, Asian media, etc), authors in the book provide thick description of the background and context of the places where the cultural phenomenon is popular, and illustrate the concepts with examples, case study and empirical studies. In other words, different from elementary textbooks which explicate popular culture using point-by-point or concept-by-concept format, this book grounds all the analysis in real historical and cultural contexts with a comparative perspective.


Also as a reference book, the entire volume sheds light on the theme of globalization of Asian popular culture. Among those popular cultures in the region, there are of course cultural icons, symbols, and images that are unique to Asia. However, the origin and the mechanism of how these cultures are disseminated and reproduced in Asia is not entirely local: similar to popular culture in other parts of the world, the flows, import and export of cultural products and commodities in Asia are equally calculated, manipulated and driven commercially by transnational, regional and local media corporations and politically by the government or semi-official bodies which control the media.

The reception and consumption of such Asian "foreign" culture by local audiences can also be systematically categorized as patterns of reception, decoding and interpretations, which then have significant implication for other globalizing cultures in Asia. With this set of phenomena as its core emphasis, the book addresses two seemingly contradictory and yet parallel process in the circulation of Asian pop culture: the interconnectedness between the Asian popular culture and western culture in an era of cultural globalization, and the local derivatives and versions of global culture that are necessarily disconnected from their origins in order to cater for the local market.

The book 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 culture developments and the phenomena of modernity (a discourse of cultural connection), yet such dependence is often concretized, reshaped and distorted by the local media to cater for the local market. This is a practical and business concern which tends to result in cultural disconnection between product and consumer.


The essays in this volume document variations to and cases of such cultural connection as well as of disjuncture in global culture in Asian settings. These cases could be good cases of reference. These cases all provoke students to engage in academic discussion of globalization/Asian media. Familiar cases range from pop music (e.g. hip hop), fashion magazines (e.g. Esquire and Cosmopolitan), Hollywood movies and television formats (e.g. reality TV such as Pop Idol), to cultural brands such as Disneyland and mediated icons like. Harry Potter.

Different contributors approach the problematic of cultural connection/ disconnection on different levels and through different disciplinary approaches, from political-economic analysis to cultural analysis and studies of audience and consumption. On the production level, the decentered locale enables local fashion, music and theme park managers to take a post-Fordist and neo-institutionalist logic to select, modify and distort the global culture for the local audience. While global cultural artifacts, icons, images and brands have a strong appeal to the
local Asian consumers who aspire to "catch up" with global trends and modernity, on the consumption side, their down-to-earth consumption and reception often in practice requires a local adaptation and distortion of the global ideas. This then is the cultural disconnection to which local distributors and producers aspire. The tensions, ambivalence and conflicts between the global and the local are best revealed in the concrete analysis of cultural production and consumption.