Transnational Cultural Flows Research Articles

Hybridization and the Emergence of “Gay” Identities in Hong Kong and in China

This article examines and compares the emergence of “gay” identities in Hong Kong and in China, with special attention to the linguistic appropriation and creation of identity labels that have incited new modes of sexual subjectivity and politics. It argues that while global queering has been taking place, what “gay” means in New York may not be the same as what it means in Hong Kong or China. More attention should be given to the twists and turns of transnational cultural flows that result in different forms of hybridized identity. In Hong Kong, a pejorative use of “gay” became prevalent when it was transliterated with the same pronunciation as gei. By contrast, in China during the era of opening up a localized hybrid brand of gayspeak which appropriates the English lexical item “gay” enables one to engage in a stylish and modernized presentation of self. To counter the derogatory meanings of gay/gei, Hong Kong people create the label tongzhi (“comrade”), which signifies cultural specificity and serves to provide a positive sense of sexual identity. Yet, whether gay or tongzhi, sexual minorities in Hong Kong and China continue to open up the identity category for debate. The proliferation of identity labels foregrounds the contested nature of identity and the diverse ways of imagining sameness and difference with the West.

You Are What You Buy: Postmodern Consumption and Fandom of Japanese Popular Culture

In recent years, Japanese popular culture has received much attention both inside and outside the academy. Its success overseas has contributed to theories of transnational cultural flow, ‘soft power’ and ‘Gross National Cool’. At the same time, public opinion of fans, both in Japan and overseas, remains low. This article attempts to rescue fandom from its current association with social ostracism, placing it instead in a logical structure of a historical consumer culture in Japan and in the West. Fandom can be considered a rational consumer strategy, rather than a deviant psychological attribute, when considered within the hyper-developed context of a media-saturated, late-capitalist consumer society. Fandom, when viewed from this perspective, can be distinguished from pathological behaviour and focuses on pleasure, the pursuit of social capital, and individualised identity building, especially in a society where traditional corporate groups such as the family or the workplace no longer offer the same attraction.

Globalization, East Asian media cultures and their publics

In the last two decades, media and cultural globalization has reached another level of development and penetration. While various (national) media markets have been penetrated and integrated by the powerful missionaries of global media culture such as News Corporation, Disney and Time Warner, the development of East Asian media cultural production and inter-Asian media co-production, circulation and consumption has become no less conspicuous. On the one hand, these developments have highlighted the de-Westernized patterns of cultural production, circulation and connection in, from and within the region. However, on the other, it is still questionable if these developments have eventually challenged uneven transnational media cultural flows and have truthfully promoted dialogic connections among people of various places, as they reproduce hierarchy, unevenness and marginalization. This article will critically review how the rise of Asian media culture production and inter-Asian connections fails to serve wider public interests locally, nationally and transnationally, especially in terms of the promotion of uneven globalization process in which the logic of market has deeply governed the production, circulation and consumption of media culture. Given that the states are supporting the activities of transnational media culture industries, it is imperative for researchers to examine more rigorously the unevenness, inequality and marginalization in the inter-Asian mass culture network, and to collaborate transnationally with various social actors so as to advance inter-Asian media culture connections in more democratic and dialogic ways.

Shared Spaces of Transnational Transit: Filipino Gay Tourists, Labour Migrants, and the Borders of Class Difference

Between 2006 and 2008, I conducted autoethnographic research in what I refer to as Manila's ‘‘bright lights'' gay scene. As part of that research, I collected travel stories from young, urban, middle and upper-class gay men, in an attempt to draw out the relationship between transnational mobility, urban gay life, and dreams of global belonging. This article comes out of those stories as well as out of my own stories of living in, leaving, and returning to Manila. Starting with the international airport as a trope for the shifting boundaries that exist between kinds of travellers based on class identity, the essay moves on to describe the nationalised, gendered and class-specific divisions that cut across the transnational flows of gay Filipino culture globally.

Transnational cultural flows: An analysis of women's magazines in China

This study examines the expansion process of women's magazines in China, particularly over the past few decades. From 1921 to 1976 only a few women's magazines were available in China and all were owned and published by the government. However, since the late 1980s, there has been a proliferation of women's magazines – both local and international. Today, Chinese language versions of Western women's magazines, such as Elle, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazaar, and Japanese magazines like Rayli can be found on the magazine racks of any major city in China. The introduction and competition from international magazines has changed the look and content of local women's magazines. This preliminary study uses historical analysis and political economy to examine the growth of women's magazines in China and to discuss how the changing face of women's media represents a shift in gender ideology in China.

Globalization, or the logic of cultural hybridization: the case of the Korean wave

This article explores a regionally specific phenomenon and logic of transnational popular cultural flow as an example to illustrate the complexity involved in the cultural hybridization thesis and the implications that it has for the debate on the globalization of culture. This article argues that the Korean wave is an indication of new global, as well as local, transformations in the cultural and the economic arena. This phenomenon especially signifies a regionalization of transnational cultural flows as it entails Asian countries’ increasing acceptance of cultural production and consumption from neighboring countries that share similar historical and cultural backgrounds, rather than from politically and economically powerful others. The article further argues that the Korean wave is a sign of how a country considered ‘in-between’ (or sub-periphery) can find a niche and reposition itself as a cultural mediator in the midst of global cultural transformation.

Reconsidering Transnational Cultural Flows of Popular Music in East Asia: Transbordering Musicians in Japan and Korea Searching for "Asia"

After the South Korean government lifted its ban on Japanese culture in 1998, transnational cultural flows between Japan and South Korea entered a third phase of cultural traffic between the two countries. Among the flows, I concentrate on transbordering or translocation of Japanese and Korean musicians and interactions between them. After analyzing cultural interactions between Japanese and Korean music both in contemporary and historical experience, I explain in detail the practices of these transbordering musicians, especially Lee-tzsche (Sang-ŭn Yi) and Hachi (Kasuga Hirofumi). The different types of symbolic representations by different transbordering musicians are critically examined. I argue that analyzing contemporary Asian cultural flows in this conceptual framework has implications for the public debate in Korea in regard to how to go beyond postcolonial relations without erasing the memory of a troubled history.

Governing the health of the hybrid self: Integrative medicine, neoliberalism, and the shifting biopolitics of subjectivity

This paper employs a Foucauldian perspective on the shifting spacialisation of medical knowledge to explore the manner in which integrative medicine is discursively represented by its biomedical architects so as to ensure good cultural fit with neoliberal strategies of governance amid the development of transnational global cultural flows in which human subjectivity has itself hybridized, provoking this reconfiguration of medical knowledge. It is argued that integrative medicine represents an expansion of medical rationality into all domains of human life: biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual. This proposed expansion of biomedical influence rests not upon domination but rather, through enabling the autonomous individual of transnational, neoliberal governance.

Transcultural Flow of Demure Aesthetics: Examining Cultural Globalisation through Gothic & Lolita Fashion

The process of cultural globalisation does not always imply cultural homogenisation. Rather, it can be seen as a process of cultural ‘glocalisation’ and hybridisation where cultures continuously interact with and interpret each other to engender a hybrid cultural form. As Arjun Appadurai (1993) contends, neither centrality nor peripherality of culture exists in the context of cultural globalisation. Rather, transnational cultural forms are likely to circulate in multiple directions. This is particularly evident when examining Gothic & Lolita – a Japanese fashion trend which has emerged since the late 1990s. Applying Jan Nederveen Pieterse’s theory of ‘globalisation as hybridisation’ (2004), and Roland Robertson’s concept of ‘glocalisation’ (1995), this article attempts to explore how this fashion trend manifests the process of cultural ‘glocalisation’, hybridisation, and interaction through the localisation of Western Goth subculture and especially, historical European dress styles in Japan. In addition, it explores how the fashion signifies the idea of ‘reverse’ flow of culture through an ethnographic observation of an English-speaking online community devoted to the trend. The analysis of the online community also seeks to establish the idea that this transnational cultural flow serves as an alternative to the local culture.

Au-delà du « Cool Japan », la globalisation culturelle...

Leaving Aside “Cool Japan”... Things we’ve got to discuss about media and cultural globalization The spread of Japanese media culture to many parts of the world has been domestically and internationally acclaimed for its cultural creativity that stands out from its American counterparts and for its promotion of Japan’s “soft power.” However, such an affirmative discourse tends to ignore how it has been occurring in the uneven globalization process. This paper will argue that the developments of Japanese media culture export are symptomatic of the restructuring of unevenness in the transnational media and cultural flows, in the process of which the logic of neoliberalism has deeply penetrated not only the corporate production and circulation of media culture but also the state’s cultural policies in its opportunistic uses to maximize national interests.

La japonité selon Jeanne d'Arc.

Japaneseness according to Joan of Arc: Western Myths and Narratives in Manga and Anime The appropriation of transnational cultural flows that occurs as a result of globalization is studied here through adaptations of Western narratives in manga and anime. This “Other” is integrated by exacerbating some of its features: The West is presented in Japanese works as conveyor of an excessive, unjust and potentially dangerous world, as the manifestation of Cartesianism taken to the extreme. Japaneseness, which is then defined by opposition to this incorporated otherness, brings out a supposedly specifically Japanese sensitivity, thus perpetuating a long intellectual tradition that sees in the feeling of things the very essence of Japaneseness by contrast to the rational Chinese and Western mind. Episodes from the life of Joan of Arc and Athena’s divine interventions for instance then take on new meaning, which serves to promote Japaneseness and the essential values it conveys, such as the importance of social harmony and the close interdependence among members of the community.

When Sadako Meets Mr. Vampire: The Impact of Ringu on Hong Kong Ghost Films

This study investigates the cultural adaptation and appropriation of Japanese elements in Hong Kong ghost movies, using Ringu as the main reference. Discussing the impact of Ringu on Hong Kong ghost movies from historical, industrial, and cultural perspectives, it aims to deepen understanding of the interplay of cultural appropriation, domestication, and transnational cultural flows in Asian film making in the age of globalization.

Migrant Civil Society: New Voices in the Struggle Over Community Development

ABSTRACT:Port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods have long been a feature of the American city. Dense cross-border networks are reshaping port-of-entry immigrant neighborhoods and creating “transnational communities” where forces of global economic restructuring and practices of everyday life combine into a distinctive form of urbanization. Yet immigration has also created tensions and conflicts. Lack of affordable housing, inadequate access to quality schools, substandard employment, and unmet basic needs are among the problems facing large segments of society. Their resolution has been rendered more problematic by questions concerning the immigration status of many residents. The lack of recourse for undocumented immigrants to the state has meant that the task of resolving these social problems has been displaced onto civil society. This article considers the role of nonprofit, community organizations and social movement organizations—part of an emergent migrant civil society—in responding to a variety of social and economic concerns affecting residents of Albany Park. The community area of Albany Park on Chicago’s north side has for decades served as a first destination for immigrants. In 2000 the foreign-born population in Albany Park climbed to 52%, making it one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. Through an examination of neighborhood social struggles we consider the ways in which transnational flows of people, commerce, culture, and social practices come to ground in neighborhoods like Albany Park. Then we present two case studies of social activism by segments of migrant civil society. The first examines the antigentrification movement launched by the Balanced Development Coalition, while the second considers workers’ rights activism in support of day laborers. Finally, we reflect on the implications of the Albany Park cases for the study of migrant civil society more broadly.

Korean Wave and Korean Women Television Viewers in Singapore

Against the backdrop of cultural globalization and regionalization, this study theorizes on transnational television consumption and cultural flows within Asia by examining the ways in which women of the Korean diaspora enjoy homeland television drama while living in Singapore. It was found that Korean drama viewing provides these women with cultural resources to resist male dominance. In a word, they acquire semiotic power to produce resistive reading from the resources of the text. The Korean Wave phenomenon plays an interesting role in this. Moving the cultural industries' position upward in the Korean economy has allowed the expertise about Korean television drama to function as means of empowering women in familial power relations. It has also heightened their ethnic pride in their relations with other Asians. Articulated in these contexts, the Korean Wave produces new meanings and serves new cultural interests for women.

Questioning Proximity

abstractThe study of transnational cultural flows has been of continuing interest among media and communication researchers, with recent studies focusing on cultural flows within geographically and culturally adjacent nations. It is often suggested that the level of “cultural proximity” that exists determines the success of cultural exchange between countries regarded to possess similar cultural traits. This notion, that local audiences will have preference for cultural commodities from countries with which they share cultural ties in recognition of their own culture, has enjoyed much intellectual currency in recent times, especially in relation to analyses of regional media markets. The danger of using the cultural proximity thesis lies in the fact that, if cultural ‘resemblance’ is regarded to be the sole determinant of a foreign cultural commodity’s local acceptance without taking into consideration specific social and historical circumstances, what results may be an essentialist and shallow analysis. Based on a six-month interview-based study of East Asian TV drama fans in Indonesia, this paper critically examines the use of the cultural proximity model in determining the reasons behind successful local acceptance of imported cultural commodities. The paper proposes that in-depth audience research will need to be conducted in order to understand the sorts of resonances local audiences experience when consuming transnational cultural commodities.

Japanese football and world sports: raising the global game in a local setting

Professional football in Japan, as elsewhere, has increasingly become linked to agents, structures, and processes of global capitalism. However, football is as much about culture as it is about business. Placing Japanese football into the context of world sports seems to be a promising endeavour to get fresh insight into the dialectics of the global and the local in transnational cultural flows and the processes underlying the globalization of sports. By analysing the institutional arrangements, vested interests, and power relationships of parties involved in the production, practice, and consumption of ‘the people’s game’ in Japan, this study explores a recent showcase for the globalization of sports. It also addresses the question of whether the culture of sports may be considered a political agent that affects political choices, for example in regional development planning, local economic policy, or public health policy. As popular interests and domestic politics have shaped and continue to shape football in Japan, it is argued that globalization cannot be regarded as a commercially driven process aiming at the creation of a global market for products whose popular consumption leads to the standardization of cultures that were once distinctive.

Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s

As an international system of competitive, achievement-oriented sport developed into one of the interwar period's most potent carriers of transnational mass culture, the Soviet Union initially chose not to participate. Ideologically hostile toward capitalist internationalism and suspicious of international cultural influences, the Soviet regime instead attempted to create an alternative international system of `proletarian sport' that eschewed record-seeking and individualism. In the 1930s, however, the political benefits of participation in `capitalist' sport (including the opportunity to influence foreign public opinion and to project images of national power) drew the Soviet Union into participation. Although `capitalist' sport was modified in the Soviet context, a reciprocal `sportification' of Soviet physical culture also occurred, as the process of cultural transfer embedded the Soviet Union in transnational cultural flows that sometimes served to subvert Soviet ideology.

Nomadic Intellectuals: Asian Stars in Atlanticland

'Hybridity' and 'globalization.' Magic words. They can generate academic con ferences. Salman Rushdie, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Arjun Appadurai, Gyan Prakash, Lata Mani, Gouri Vishwanathan, Akhil Gupta, Dipesh Chakra barty, Amitav Ghosh, Talal Asad, Pal Ahluwahlia. Magic names for the part. Draw cards for conferences. These names flag the world of Asian intellectuals of the diaspora and their cul tural productions. Whether empirical, theoretical or literary, their contributions have been striking. They have also gathered legitimacy because they espouse positions deemed politically correct within liberal quarters in the West. With out necessarily implicating every one of those named above, let me summarize some dominant strands of argument in the cultural productions around them. Collectivized in arbitrary fashion, the individuals named above stand as an illustrative sample for certain politics of identity in the contemporary world. For anti-essentialism and anti-nationalism. For cosmopolitan rationality and its secularism. For the itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny postmodern world of heterogeneity. For the celebration of borderlands, homelessness, decentered ambiguity, het erogeneity, and blurred genres. The birth of such journals as Diaspora, Public Culture, Social Identities, and Identity in and around the 1990s is testimony to the power of this strand of emphasis. But this work is marked too, on occasions, by positivistic constructions of Aunt Sallies, whether 'culture' as fixed and discrete entity or specific 'nation' as 'homogeneous,' that are then decimated by their powerful prose. As Daniel, also South Asian, recently notes in passing: most poststructuralists and post modernists are not only like their structuralist counterparts but paradoxically also like the positivists they shun: they are nominalists in the extreme (1998: 77). Take the early programmatic statements presented in such felicitous prose by Appadurai (1988 and 1991). He argues for a genuinely cosmopolitan ethno graphic in anthropology in contemporary times, practice that could cope with the transnational cultural flows and the deterritorialization of the

Coastal East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean: Long-Distance Trade, Empire, Migration, and Regional Unity, 1750-1970

IN RECENT YEARS there has been a growing awareness that the disciplinary boundaries of traditional area studies often do as much to obscure the contemporary world as they do to illuminate it. In a world where Indians, Pakistanis, and Koreans might work in the Persian Gulf or Silicon Valley, where North Americans run cafes in Katmandu, where Nigerian immigrants live in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Persian Gulf, where Dearborn, Michigan is home to thousands of Yemenis, and all of these people live in a world awash with transnational flows of culture and trade, making sense out of one part of the world without reference to others seems increasingly quixotic. As a result, people who teach and do research on the contemporary world have been at the forefront of rethinking the geographical or spatial units of analysis they use. Historians have been slower to move away from this old analytical framework because, at first glance anyway, the boundaries used in area studies seemed to make sense in the past, even if they have shortcomings in the present. Historians have, nevertheless, used area studies boundaries in several ways. First, much of the historical work done on the non-western world is done by people who are trained in area studies, teach in area studies, and

Contemporary African Migrations in a Global Context

Migrations from the South to the North are sometimes seen as representing civilizational counterpenetration, revolutionary cosmopolitanism, and cultural transnationalism.1 The culturalist biases of these perspectives tend to ignore a fundamental feature of international migration, that more often than not people migrate to sell their labor power and that the patterns of migration, labor procurement, and utilization are conditioned by the dynamics of capitalist development, expansion, and accumulation. Not only is international migration tied to the changing dynamics of capitalism as a world system, it constitutes a critical element of the international division of labor. This essay takes the view that the cultural and economic processes of international migration are intertwined; that African migrations are as much a part of the complex mosaic of transnational cultural flows as they are of labor and other economic flows. The essay begins with a general outline of the dynamics and directions of contemporary global migrations before surveying the patterns and trends of African migrations to the North.