Circling In on “Asian Media Studies”

Abstract

Circling In on “Asian Media Studies” Alexander Zahlten Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility by Erin Y. Huang. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 271. $99.95 cloth, $26.95 paper, $14.55 e-book. Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan by Diane Wei Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xiii + 267. $55.00 cloth, $29.00 paper. Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital by Ani Maitra. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 299. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri Silvio. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 270. $80.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $24.99 e-book. Does something like “Asian Media Studies” exist? If it did, it would invariably be a tenuously positioned field, subject to the recently reformulated critiques of area studies even as it struggled for attention from a largely US- and Eurocentric and increasingly philosophical media [End Page 289] studies “proper.”1 At the same time, there is no question that work that understands itself as engaging with “media” in the context of Northeast, South, or Southeast Asia has increased immensely. Asia has become a lively and theoretically fertile research space. In most of this work, institutionalized area divisions are implicitly or explicitly baked into the accompanying research frameworks, and they often stand for markedly different approaches, theoretical propensities, reference points, and priorities. Though to some degree a generalization, I nevertheless suggest that beyond the general focus on audiovisual media forms recent English-language scholarship on South Asia often foregrounds issues of decolonization and postcoloniality.2 Scholarship on Southeast Asia builds on such frameworks but increasingly explores issues of migration and sexuality.3 On the other hand, work on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) engages with understanding the ruptures and continuities of the relationship between political discourse and media technology and gives special consideration to issues of the archive.4 Research centered on Japan, perhaps most of all, moves toward a media-philosophical approach and considers the question of rethinking regionality and the dynamics between media channels.5 The vexing and almost certainly deliberate vagueness of what constitutes media (or the even more nebulous and all-encompassing “media ecology”) in much of this work potentially opens up leeway for important discussions beyond regionalized silos. But for the most part, these wider discussions have not happened. To the extent that media studies frameworks or concerns have entered into area studies, the resulting [End Page 290] work has often chosen to downplay the divisions of media specificity and traded these new contact zones for retaining institutionalized regional divisions. In the disciplinary or field-topological sense, then, much of the most recent work navigates but leaves largely unsaid the curious angle at which the techno-philosophical character of media studies proper stands to the renewed self-questioning of area studies paradigms. As media studies quickly expands the concept of media beyond the narrowly technological to include, for example, clouds, atmospheres, and an all-encompassing shift to data, the field becomes increasingly universalist.6 The rapidly growing body of often-intersectional work on race and especially Blackness and media is a partial exception to this tendency.7 As certain sections of area studies make renewed efforts toward decolonizing, decentering, and reexamining their cold war legacies, they grasp for new ways to consider site-specificity and connectivity. How, then, to consider “media” and “area” together productively, in ways that negotiate this relationship but can still think beyond this tension of the moment? Media studies proper usually equates to Euro-American area studies, yet without engaging the limitations of an area studies framework. What contribution can scholarship that is more self-aware of issues of site-specificity make to understanding the limitations and possibilities engendered by our respective media situations as they shape social, economic, and political dynamics, as well as perceptions, sensations, and epistemologies? How does a kind of analogous concern with boundaries between “media” and between territories point to a potential reimagining of both sides of this coin, or of...