Transnational Cultural Flows Research Articles

Cultural Re-Importation Through Soft Power and Transnational Cultural Flows Mediated by Digital Influence: The Case of City Pop Music in Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia

Japanese popular culture (pop culture) has penetrated and influenced foreign cultural markets through various means. Japanese city pop music, popular from the 1970s through the 1980s, has charted a new trajectory in this transnational cultural spillover. The attractiveness of the city pop genre was rediscovered abroad; the hit songs were disseminated through social media, which eventually led to a revival of this genre’s popularity in Japan. This study refers to this phenomenon as cultural re-importation and proposes some theoretical deliberations to capture it. It recognises that the complex process of re-importation is mediated by digital means of communication, such as social media platforms YouTube and TikTok. This study employs three theoretical perspectives on the cultural spillover mechanism, namely, Japan’s soft power, transnational cultural flows, and digital influence. To elucidate these processes empirically, we analysed data from in-depth interviews with 35 young people from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan. Secondary data were collected as well, including online news and media releases. Based on the interview findings, this study posits that cultural re-importation is a complex interplay of several factors.

Transnational Cultural Flow from Home: Korean Community in Greater New York

Transnational Cultural Flow from Home: Korean Community in Greater New York

Platformization of the Korean Wave: a critical perspective

ABSTRACT By employing the platformization of cultural production from a critical political economy approach, this article analyzes the transition of the Korean cultural industries to the platform-driven phase of Hallyu. By discussing the highly transnationalized and platformized Korean Wave in the shifting global media environment, it examines how Netflix platformizes and appropriates the Korean broadcasting industry through various strategies, such as investing in original content creation, licensing Korean content, and subcontractualization of Korean production. These strategies reveal that Korean cultural industry firms have become subordinated to, and rely on, global OTT platforms. In light of the growing influences of Netflix and other global platforms, the article explores the implications of the platformization of cultural production for the transnational cultural flows of Hallyu.

How <i>Pachinko</i> Mirrors Migrant Life: Rethinking the Temporal, Spatial, and Linguistic Dimensions of Migration

This paper critically analyzes the Apple TV+ series Pachinko (2022) to comprehend its cross-historical and cross-regional metanarrative unfolding from the organization of temporality, spatiality, and language. As the TV adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s eponymous novel, Pachinko depicts a family’s migration journey from Korea to Japan after the 1910s and emphasizes their suffering from systemic discrimination against temporary Korean residents. Produced by talents from Korea, Japan, and the United States, Pachinko displays strong hybridization that combines American TV conventions with a distinct East Asian culture and history. The hybridized, multicultural, and multilingual background of the production necessitates a transnational and interdisciplinary framework to analyze its critical success and cultural implications. Expanding Harvey’s notion of time-space compression, the paper conceptualizes the temporal and spatial experience of watching a transnational production via global streaming as a mirrored experience of migrant life. It tackles television dramas as a strategy to understand contemporary migration and globalization by first outlining the evolutionary trajectory of television, and then identifying the movements, mobility, and the transnational cultural flows in Pachinko. Moreover, this paper analyzes the linguistic aspects of Pachinko, particularly in translation and multilingualism, to establish a connection between language and cultural identities. Inquiring into previous literature on translation, this paper also seeks to understand the complexity of communicating in multiple languages, both literally and metaphorically. Finally, this paper examines how migration and migrants are reimagined in Pachinko at a time when national borders and cultural and linguistic barriers are quickly eroded by global streaming TV.

De/Constructing the soft power discourse in Hallyu

ABSTRACT This study examines the discourse surrounding the transnational flows of South Korean popular culture, known as Hallyu (the Korean Wave), and its relationship to the country’s soft power through a discourse analysis of Korean news and social media. Specifically, the study explores how Hallyu was addressed as Korea’s soft power tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it gained even greater popularity overseas through digital means. The study questions how local cultural intermediaries, such as journalists, critics and YouTubers, have engaged with the Hallyu phenomenon. Although Hallyu is often considered a core component of Korea’s soft power, aimed at increasing its influence in overseas reception points, there is a lack of studies on the meanings of Hallyu as a discursive construct in the Korean mediascape. Therefore, this study explores how Korean news and social media perceive and represent the global circulation of their local cultural content.

Rethinking Discourse of Chineseness on Chinese Popular Music

In the context of a globalizing tendency and multicultural fusing, Chineseness as a term is both ancient and new, usually used to indicate the identity of “being Chinese”. Considering transnational flows of capital, culture and migration permeating within the sphere of Chinese popular music, various forms of Chineseness have been created. This paper aims to rethink and discuss the question related to Chineseness in contemporary Chinese popular music through reviewing several articles. By textual analyzing, this paper shows how these articles describe and embody the Chineseness discourse and its future in Chinese popular music.

From Cool Japan to Cold Japan: grime cyborgs in Black Britain

This article examines the overlooked phenomenon of how black British grime music artists intentionally and selectively remix Japanese pop cultural artifacts to carve out a hybrid cultural space that gives voice to their urban realities and articulates counterhegemonic black subjectivities. From the early 2000s, at the same time as state-centered discourses of ‘Cool Japan’ emerged to explain the global rise of Japanese pop culture, grime artists were already on their own terms sampling Japanese video games and anime to articulate emergent feelings of ‘coldness’, which reflects their sense of alienation on the margins of British society. The author introduces ‘Cold Japan’ as the other Cool Japan, and a way of understanding this fundamentally intertwined mode of cultural hybridity and being that forms the essence of black Britain’s grime. This article uses the cyborg figure to disclose how grime artists transform Cold Japan into a site of countercultural resistance to subvert their oppression by self-generating and embodying transgressive posthuman identities. Examining how selected ‘cold’ Japanese pop cultural elements and technologies entangle with urban black life and identity formation in 21st century Britain, the article contributes to discussions on the impact of transnational flows of Japanese pop culture and cultural hybridization.

Fractured Landscape, Flowing Culture & Fabricated Identities: Exploring and Evoking the Transnational Middle Class in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

The transnational middle class provides us with notions about culture-areas that overlap several nation-states, or of multicultural nations. Cultural diversity, historical memory, and societal organizations are never inscribed on a neutral grid in transnational space. Amitav Ghosh invokes a crucial inquiry of transnationalism: how do we locate the hybrid middle class transnational culture? Does the transnational encounter unsettle the idea that cultures and countries are analogous, leading to a new middle-class culture? In my paper I am going to explore how transnationalism complicates the relationship between space and culture. How the question of interpreting social change and cultural transformation as occurring within interconnected areas is raised by the fractured landscape of independent nations and sovereign cultures. We can see that identity of place emerges from a specific dialogic involvement in a framework of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultured fabrication as a community in the middleclass notions of locality or community, which refer to both a demarcated physical space and clusters of interaction. Ghosh's transnational middle class has been mobile and identities less fixed than the static approaches of classical anthropology. The rapidly growing and intensifying movement of the middle class, combined with a rejection of cultural products and practices, has created a profound sense of loss of territorial roots, erosion of place cultural distinctiveness, and anthropological theory ferment. In the world of Diaspora, transnational cultural flows and mass movement of populations, old-fashioned attempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling zrray of postcolonial simulacra, doublings and redoubling.

“Chuck Norris, Please Help!” Transnational Cultural Flows in the 2017 Anti-Corruption Protests in Romania

This study examines the meaning-making work of transnational cultural references in protest. Whether using the image of the superhero or re-mixing a famous painting, the presence of such references in home-made protest placards was a striking feature of the 2017 anti-corruption protests in Romania. By means of a qualitative analysis of 58 such signs, this study identifies five types of transnational cultural resources co-opted in the local protest: politics, high and popular culture, brand names, computer culture, and other motivational slogans and protest symbols. Such references are appropriated in local protest for their recognizability potential, their generic interpretive frames, or their usefulness in generating surprising re-iterations of the political cause. Yet, the use of such references remains interwoven with the symbolic and political capital of professional, middle-class elites. In the Romanian case, the use of these transnational cultural references also constructs the protesters as cosmopolitan and aligned with Western cultural consumption and political practices. In turn, this frames political opponents as backwards, parochial, and unfit for democratic politics.

Constructing Subjects of Knowledge Beyond the Nation

This essay challenges the methodological nationalism inherent in guoxue by showing that it is possible to construct alternative subjects of knowledge. To this end, it explores the content and historical development of Hakkaology (Kejiaxue). This discipline challenges guoxue in two ways: firstly, it posits a likewise ethnically defined, but distinct subject of knowledge that is both seen as part of the Chinese nation and as unique. It thus raises the question of the unity and diversity of Chinese national culture, while equally encompassing a transnational and global dimension. Secondly, the historical development of Hakkaology encompasses several layers of both national and local as well as Western knowledge. In contrast to the way that guoxue is constructed, Hakkaology appeared as intimately bound up with transnational cultural flows from its very beginnings.

K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans

Korean popular music or K-pop has achieved popularity among global audiences. The uniqueness of K-pop fan culture has helped to shape the success of the K-pop industry. Through a case study of Chinese fan labor vis-à-vis K-pop male idol group GOT7, the author notes three types of K-pop fan labor: specialized labor, managerial labor, and unskilled labor. This research argues that fan labor transforms the K-pop industry into an alternative creative industry because fan labor as creative labor is an indispensable part of the K-pop industry. Fan labor is utilized to distinguish fans from non-fans, and to draw boundaries between the grateful, more enthusiastic fans and the casual self-proclaimed fans who do not contribute to fandom or their idols’ success. These Chinese K-pop fans comply with the K-pop industry’s commodification of culture, are exploited by the K-pop industry, and seek empowerment in the K-pop production and distribution process. This paper’s exploration of fan labor, based on the author’s participant observations and in-depth interviews, will thus contribute to studies on the creative industries, creative labor, fandom, and the transnational flows of popular culture.

“Your one and only source”: “peripheral” fashion editorship within the transnational cultural flow. St. Petersburg publication Modnyi magazin (1862–1883)

ABSTRACT This article discusses how a fashion editor in a culturally “peripheral” country engages with the global cultural flow as a local gate-keeper. Classifying Paris as a metropolis and St. Petersburg as (semi-)periphery, it looks at one of the earliest Russian fashion publications, Modnyi magazin (1862–83), edited by Sofia (Rekhnevskaia-)Mei. The article examines Mei’s fashion editorials referring to recent insights into fashion journalism. It particularly focuses on the dialectics between local and global fashion-related discourses within them. In this regard, it is suggested that reflections of the Swedish social anthropologist Ulf Hannerz on the metropolis-province interplay, media, and local cultural actors provide an insightful framework for identifying the potentialities of peripheral fashion journalism and the role of a local editor in realizing them – as much nowadays as in the nineteenth century.

Relocating the Functions of Chineseness in Chinese Popular Music after the China Wind

While the popularity of China Wind (zhongguofeng 中國風) music during the 2000s has waned somewhat since its peak, the notion of Chineseness in popular music requires reconfiguration. In the world of popular music, transnational flows of culture, migration, and capital have created various forms of Chineseness with different functions. This article examines two ways in which the perception of Chineseness functions in the music industry, namely as a re-centred Chineseness in the creative industries, and Chineseness as a globalising project, by examining the internationally franchised televised music contest The Voice of China and the recent work of two artists known for their China Wind songs, Jay Chou and Wang Leehom. Through textual analysis of media content and songs, as well interviews with industry practitioners, this article argues that Chineseness in today’s Chinese popular music is often shaped by markets, industrial practices, media censorship, state policy, and cross-industry convergence, and musicians’ artistry increasingly plays a part in forming and authorising the representation of Chineseness in contemporary Chinese popular music.

Creative Misreadings of “Thai BL” by a Filipino Fan Community: Dislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption

Creative Misreadings of "Thai BL" by a Filipino Fan CommunityDislocating Knowledge Production in Transnational Queer Fandoms Through Aspirational Consumption Thomas Baudinette (bio) While browsing the internet one night in late December 2014, I encountered a Thai television soap opera, or lakhon, named Lovesick: The Series. As a scholar of Japanese queer popular culture who investigates boys love (hereafter BL), a genre of homoerotic media produced and consumed primarily by heterosexual women,1 I quickly recognized that Lovesick conformed to the generic tropes associated with classic Japanese BL texts.2 Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had serendipitously stumbled upon an emerging genre of popular culture known in Thailand as "series wai."3 But in 2015, as I scoured the internet to learn more about this intriguing series, I came across English-language fan spaces on Facebook where Lovesick was being discussed as representative of a phenomenon that fans called "Thai BL."4 Curious, I began to observe these English-language fansites for "Thai BL" and determined that the majority of the people participating in the space were young Filipino men and women and that most sites were curated and administrated by Filipino men who identified as gay. In fact, the Philippines has emerged as an important space for fandom of so-called Thai BL, a point recently recognized by Philippine media.5 As I observed such fan sites over several years, it became increasingly apparent that the Filipino men and women participating in this fandom viewed BL as fundamentally Thai and that they actively attempted to differentiate it from what they called "Japanese yaoi."6 For these fans, BL was positioned as a form of Thai popular culture and was therefore understood to be categorically not Japanese. Previous work exploring the transnational circulation of BL has tended to advance theory which firmly centers Japan within its analysis, exploring how "culturally Japanese" products such as BL are adapted or "glocalized" to new contexts.7 Many of these studies draw upon Koichi Iwabuchi's seminal exploration of the transnational circulation of Japanese popular culture throughout East and Southeast Asia in the late 1990s.8 Iwabuchi develops a sophisticated [End Page 101] framework for understanding how the "cultural odor" of a product—that is, a product's recognizability and desirability based in its embeddedness or centering within a specific cultural context—plays an influential role in its reception. Iwabuchi further contends that the Japanese government has played an active role in bolstering the Japanese "cultural odor" of certain popular culture products such as anime and manga by essentializing what he terms Japan's "national brand."9 Throughout his scholarship, Iwabuchi calls upon scholars to "re-center" Japan within processes of globalization and to draw upon this re-centering of Japan as a space for critical reflection on the politics of transnational cultural flow. In so doing, Iwabuchi suggests, scholars can account for the influence of national producers on the reception of Japanese cultural products outside Japan.10 Iwabuchi's theories of transnational flow are useful in understanding the processes of adaption when a Japanese cultural product such as BL leaves Japan and enters a new national space. But Iwabuchi's theories become less useful for understanding how a glocalized product further transnationalizes and potentially develops new meanings and associations through this process. Iwabuchi's insistence on "centering" analysis on the point of production (i.e., Japan) thus fails to account for situations when the so-called cultural odor of Japan is diminished or even extinguished. Furthermore, Iwabuchi's emphasis on critical reflection based in "centering" analysis on Japan may lead one to conclude that consumers who fail to recognize the "Japaneseness" of a cultural product such as BL are somehow "mistaken." While I am broadly sympathetic to Iwabuchi's scholarly project, I am concerned by his criticisms of fans whose reading practices are positioned as "misunderstanding" Japan's role in the production of the texts that they consume. Like Bertha Chin and Lori Morimoto, I am also troubled by Iwabuchi's conflation of nation and culture and his lack of engagement with the intensely affective nature of fannish consumption.11 Taking inspiration from Eve Sedgwick's call to read data through...

What Is Japanese Cinema?

Imamura Taihei (1911–86) is considered by many to be the first film theorist in Japan, and he is known chiefly for his two grand theories on documentary film and animation. Yet, at the same time, Imamura also developed a third, no less ambitious theory, that of “Cinema and Japanese Art,” in which he specified the national characteristics of Japanese cinema. This essay concentrates on this third and less studied thesis. Although the argument Imamura puts forth in the thesis is elusive, aspects in it enable an interpretation of Japanese cinema along lines of phenomenological critical theory. From this perspective, it appears that Imamura establishes a theorization of national cinema that is predicated not on film as a product, or ontological aspects of what films project, but rather on the phenomenology of the film-watching experience. In effect, the thesis thus defines Japanese cinema not as the total sum of films produced in Japan, or by Japanese filmmakers, but as a shared watching experience of films regardless of their country of origin. Measuring Imamura’s thesis against other theories of Japanese national cinema that were published around the same time, during World War II, the essay argues that his theorization is in fact flexible enough to withstand more recent critique leveled against the notion of national cinema, and even allows radical new ways of thinking about national cinema in the contemporary moment of a new media environment and increasing transnational cultural flows.

South African Gay Pages and the politics of whiteness

ABSTRACTIn this article, I use Gay Pages as a local archive of cultural meaning to think about the relationship between race, sexuality, and identity in a post-apartheid context. Through an analysis of the quarterly magazine series, I focus on how an invisible and unacknowledged whiteness marks privileged ways of both speaking and being heard. I argue that whiteness continues to function as the custodian of the normative in much of South Africa’s public discourse – a post-apartheid racial politics with implications that exceed this particular cultural text. I focus on editions of the magazine published between 2012 and 2016 in order to identify the continuities in normative racial and gendered power. The analysis extends beyond a consideration of the magazine’s erasure of non-white bodies and takes the form of a close reading of the assumptions and racial histories that underpin a number of articles and editorials. My analysis of the magazine centres on several key themes including the interplay between local ideas and transnational cultural flows; the production and circulation of an assimilationist aesthetic; revisionist histories of the past; and representations of pride marches.

Transnational imaginaries and the negotiation of sexual rights during the South African transition

ABSTRACTIn this article, we trace the transnational cultural flows that shaped the recognition of sexual rights as human rights during the transition to democracy in South Africa. Through a close reading of Beverley Ditsie and Nicky Newman’s documentary film, Simon & I (2002), we investigate the contested history of postapartheid sexual rights in which local cultural politics overlap and intersect with transnational agents, ideologies, and affect. Ditsie and Newman’s documentary centres on the figure of Simon Nkoli, a prominent gay rights and anti-apartheid activist. The film traces the complexities, contradictions and transnational connections that produce an expanded understanding of rights as indivisible and universal. Focusing on the contesting local and transnational imaginaries in which the sexual rights regime was constituted, we resist discourses suggesting that the constitutional codification of sexual rights in South Africa was inevitable. Far from being inevitable, we argue, the recognition of gay and lesbian rights as human rights was located within the crosshairs of an uncertain and volatile historical moment.

The rise and fall of Korean drama export to China: The history of state regulation of Korean dramas in China

In October 2016, approximately 3 months after the Korean government agreed to host the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, TV stations and online streaming platforms in China stopped airing Korean dramas, movies, TV shows and commercials that featured Korean celebrities. While the post-Terminal High Altitude Area Defense blockade of Korean cultural products received much attention, the restriction should not be taken as an idiosyncratic case of cultural retaliation over the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense in the Korean peninsula. Chinese government regulation of Korean TV shows should be understood in the larger context of restricting the inflow of capitalist culture, which is viewed as a threat to socialist ideology and national security. We discuss the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Korean drama export to China (1996–2018) to discuss the continuing role of the state in transnational cultural flows.

The politics of apology: The ‘Tzuyu Scandal’ and transnational dynamics of K-pop

This article examines how transnational cultural flows such as K-pop create intensified regional dynamics and conflicts by looking at a specific case called the ‘Tzuyu incident’. A young Taiwanese member, Chou Tzuyu, of the K-pop girl band TWICE apologized for waving a Republic of China’s flag on a Korean TV show in an apology video released on JYP Entertainment’s official YouTube channel. The video soon went viral among K-pop fans around the globe, especially in Taiwan, China, and Korea, creating a transnational discursive space that vividly captures the complex dynamics among various actors such as the local media, the transnational entertainment corporation, fans, as well as the artists. Through a close inspection of the apology video made by Tzuyu and JYP entertainment, as well as the responses generated in China and Taiwan, this article examines the complicated power dynamics of a variety of players involved in the production and consumption of K-pop. The article argues that geopolitics in the Tzuyu incident is manifested in gendered narratives, showing the uneven power relations between the entertainment company, consumers, and the artist as well as that between China and Taiwan.

Between a curse and a resource: the meanings of women’s racialised sexuality in contemporary Italy

This article explores the racialisation of women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy at the intersection between the national imagination and transnational cultural and commodity flows. Starting from the experience of a young Italian woman whose work centres on the commodification of her sexual desirability and who is recurrently classified as ‘foreign’, it discusses the roots as well as effects of the racialised male gaze under which she negotiates her agency. In so doing, it examines the meanings of her failure to be recognised as an Italian citizen as she navigates between contempt and desire, stigma and praise, alienation and pleasure. On the one hand, the article traces the thread between her experience and the othering processes underpinning the construction of Italy as a nation state and an empire, and whose legacies persist in the country’s postcolonial present. On the other hand, the article explores women’s racialisation as a process which can magnify the social and economic value of their desirability in a context increasingly characterised by the sexualisation of culture and trade. Based on ethnographic research undertaken in 2012–2013, this article contributes to the emerging body of postcolonial scholarship and intersectional studies on women’s sexuality in contemporary Italy.