Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia

East Asia is a powerhouse of economic and social development, with cultural industries that have burgeoned as countries in the region have generated consumer economies and a middle class. Despite ongoing security tensions, growing evidence suggests that a vigorous cultural trade in such commodities as comics, cinema and TV drama is creating a shared regional popular culture. The widespread diffusion of the Internet, and the concomitant rise of non-professional online publishing and social networking, is creating new communities among the consumers of these cultural commodities. Rivalry for leadership in the sphere of the culture industries provides a fertile field for the study of soft market power versus hard political power. The competing national discourses of the ‘Korean Wave’ (hallyu) and Japan’s ‘Gross National Cool’ indicate a struggle for new forms of influence in the East Asian region, a struggle that is becoming more intense as China, too, starts to exert soft power influence on a global scale in the form of cultural industries and foreign aid. This volume addresses transnational production and consumption of media products such as cinema, television dramas, popular music, comics and animation in Japan, South Korea and China. Its multidisciplinary approaches include Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies, and a content analysis of the popular discourse of otherness in the East Asian context. While suggesting the emergence of a shared East Asian popular consumer culture, it critically examines the proposition that such a shared popular culture can resolve tensions between nation-states, and highlights the appropriation of popular culture by nation-states in an attempt to exercise soft power. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in Asian Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, and will be particularly useful to researchers in the emerging area of intra-Asian Cultural Studies.

About the Author :
Daniel Black is a Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University in Australia. His area of expertise is Japanese popular culture. His work has appeared in journals such as Continuum, Journal of Popular Culture and Metro. Stephen Epstein is the Director of the Asian Studies Programme at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society and literature and has also translated or co-translated numerous works of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including Contradictions, by Yang Gwi-ja (Cornell East Asia Series, 2005), Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, by Park Wan-suh (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Long Road, by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia, 2010). He is currently working on a book entitled Korea and Its Neighbours: Popular Media and National Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Alison Tokita is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Australia, where she has also been Director of the Japanese Studies Centre. She has published widely in Japanese studies, including as co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music and as editor-in-chief of six refereed volumes of papers under the general title Japanese Studies: Communities, Cultures, Critiques. Her areas of expertise include Japanese performing arts, international marriage, Japanese popular culture, and Japanese diaspora.