Younghan Chodevelopment, especially of TV dramas, is one of uneven and unequal flows and exchanges across
national and cultural boundaries” (2008, 4). Furthermore, in East Asian pop culture, we still
observe the “tendency of audiences to assume a ‘national identity-culture’ as a mainframe from
which to identify/distance themselves from onscreen characters and actions” (Chua 2008, 85).
Moreover, national boundary and sovereignty issues are still intensely disputed in East Asia,
which reminds us not to take popularly circulated ideas such as free trade, the demise of the
nation state, or the rise of cosmopolitanism for granted. Such a condition not only implies that
the national still functions as the main framework, but also reveals that it is necessary to go
beyond the national framework when considering East Asian pop culture.
Double inscription further indicates the presence of a regional orientation toward and
desire for global modernity and capitalism. Many Asian countries have been simultaneously
undergoing very compressed forms of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. As
Chua suggests, the enthusiastic popular reception of regional pop products in Asia signals that
“Asians from different locations may share a similar orientation towards capitalist-consumerist
modernity” (2008, 81). East Asian pop culture as a modern form of contemporaneity has been
made possible by the economic growth in Asian countries as well as by a regional emphasis on
middle-class lives and urban settings. Wee notes that “contemporary East Asia is located inside
capitalist modernity,” and goes on to identify capitalist modernization, modern culture, and
intense urbanization as “major defining feature[s] of the New East Asia” (2012, 197–198). In its
current configuration, therefore, contemporaneity—different but equal—along capitalist mod-
ern temporality is embedded into many pop flows of East Asian pop culture (Chua 2008). In
doing so, double inscription reveals the ongoing, uneven competition among the national, the
regional, and the global rather than less nuanced approaches that place the global and the local
in dichotomous opposition (Mackintosh et al. 2009).^8
The framework proposed here is committed to illuminating the perpetual co-optation, nego-
tiation, and competition among national cultures, regional desires for modernization, and the
omnipresent influence of American pop culture. Thus, the theoretical work not only embraces
the complex, dynamic potency of living memory among regional audiences, but also demon-
strates the mutability of East Asian sensibilities, which are always unfinished and always being
formed through interaction with their own and other regional pop cultures.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I historicized East Asian pop culture by delineating a series of independent
but nonetheless linked regional pop cultures and by describing the region’s distinctive cultural
logic. Because East Asian pop culture has materialized by different degrees in different regional
spaces and periods through engagement with specific national circumstances, regional flows,
and global influences, it is an excellent space for examining these complex entanglements. The
task of historicizing East Asian pop culture, along with more concrete studies, will contribute to
constructing East Asian pop culture self-referentially.
In conclusion, I would like to suggest further tasks for scholars of Asian cultural studies in
the global system of knowledge production. First, the historical narrative enables us to tran-
scend the “West–the Rest” paradigm, in which Asian pop culture has been understood as an
object either assimilating, opposing, or even hybridizing global (i.e. American) pop culture.^9
Under the “West–the Rest” paradigm, it is impossible to contemplate Asia without imposing
Euro–American centrism (Dirlik 2000). In many studies of pop cultures, unfortunately, it is also
true that “we still tend to think of global-local interactions by how the non-West responds to
the West and to neglect how the non-West countries ‘rework’ modernities” (Iwabuchi, Mueche,