ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s there has been a dramatic increase in cultural flows and connections between the countries in the East Asian region. Nowhere is this more apparent than when looking at popular culture where uneven but multilateral exchanges of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Chinese products have led to the construction of an ‘East Asian Popular Culture’. This is both influenced by, and in turn influences, the national cultures, and generates transnational co-production and reinvention.

As East Asian popular culture becomes a global force, it is increasingly important for us to understand the characteristics of contemporary East Asian popular culture, and in particular its transnational nature. In this handbook, the contributors theorize East Asian experiences and reconsider Western theories on cultural globalization to provide a cutting-edge overview of this global phenomenon.

The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines, including: Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Communication Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Asian Studies in general.

Introduction: Critical approaches to East Asian pop culture

Part I: Historicization and Spatialization of East Asian pop culture

1. Historicizing East Asian Pop Culture,

2. East Asian popular culture and inter-Asian referencing

3. Hybridity, Korean Wave and Asian Media

4. Been informal and formal cultural economy: Chinese subtitle groups and flexible accumulation in the age of online viewing

5. Digital Diaspora, Mobility and Home

Part II: The development of national production and its regional circulation/connection

6. Films

6a. Ways of S. Korean Cinema: Phantom, Trans –Cinema and Korean Blockbusters

6b. Welcome to Chollywood: Chinese Language Cinema as a Transborder Assemblage

6c. Globalism, New Media, and Cinematically Imagining the Inescapable Japan

7. TV dramas

7a. Bordercrossing, Local Modification and Transnational Transaction of TV Dramas in East Asia

7b. Confucian Heroes in Popular Asian Dramas in the Age of Capitalism

8. Pop Music

8a. K-pop, the Sound of Subaltern Cosmopolitanism?

8b. The legendary live venues and the changing music scenes in Taipei and Beijing: Underworld and D22

9. Social media and popular activism

9a. Social Media and Popular Activism in a Korean Context

9b. Mobilizing Discontent: Social Media and Networked Activism since the Great East Japan Earthquake

9c. Social media in China: between an emerging civil society and commercialization

View III: Gender. Sexuality and Asian celebrity

10. East Asian stars, - public space and star studies

11. Ribbons and Frills: Shōjo Sensibility and the Transnational Imaginary

12. Queer Pop Culture in the Sinophone Mediasphere

13. Male and Female Idols of the Chinese Pornosphere

14. Soft, Smooth with Chocolate Abs: Performance of a Korean Masculinity in Taiwanese Men’s Fashion

Part IV: Politics of the commons

15. Shanzhai culture, Dafen art and Copyrights

16. Regional soft power/creative industries competition

17. Popular Culture and Historical Memories of War in Asia

18. Film Festivals and Regional Cosmopolitanism in East Asia: the case of Busan International Film Festival

19. Trans-East-Asia as method