Critical approaches to East Asian popular culturereferencing, (3) gender, sexuality, and cultural icons, and (4) the politics of the transnational
commons. Below, we briefly discuss these themes and highlight key issues raised in the respec-
tive chapters.
I Historicizing and spatializing East asian popular culture
How does one begin to comprehend the formation of East Asian popular culture? In this first
thematic inquiry, we turn to history, specifically, popular culture histories. The emergence of East
Asian popular culture is overdetermined by modernization, colonization, cultural globalization,
capitalism, and neoliberalism. We mention these sweeping historical forces not to imply that East
Asian popular cultures are the inevitable consequences of Westernization and Americanization.
On the contrary, these are relevant yet insufficient grounds for explaining the particularities of
these popular cultures or their active circulation within the region during the past thirty years.
The chapters under this theme offer cultural–historical and spatial narratives that illuminate East
Asian popular culture as disjunctive cultural geographies.
In Chapter 1, Younghan Cho contends that East Asian popular culture had multiple and
successive origins. From the 1960s to the present, popular cultures from the United States,
Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China have formed a mélange of recurring
regional popular culture flows. Western and inter-Asian cultural traces—the idea of double
inscription—underpin this genealogy and result in uneven regional cultural formations. In
dialogue with several authors in this volume, including Cho, Koichi Iwabuchi (Chapter 2)
maps out a mode of knowledge production which creatively engages the Western presence
in East Asian modernities so as not to fall into a never-ending call to de-Westernize media
and cultural theories. His proposal, inter-Asian referencing, encourages scholars to practice
reciprocal learning in the region and to refine uses of local terminologies with translocal
applicability. The necessary hybridization involved becomes the lynchpin in Doobo Shim’s
narrative (Chapter 3) of the Korean Wave since the 1990s. Like the Japanese and Hong Kong
popular culture flows that preceded it, the Korean Wave grew into a regional phenomenon
due to complex structural interactions between and within countries in the region, for exam-
ple, the U.S. military and cultural presence during the Cold War, cultural policies made by
the South Korean government, and a network of U.S.-influenced creators and entrepreneurs.
As China rose, the Korean Wave further cashed in on the monetization of culture through
format trades, remakes, and coproduction. Though not a major structural factor in Shim’s
chapter, regulatory and deregulatory measures have consequences for the hybridization of
popular culture.
State regulation also plays a role in Kelly Hu’s historicizing of subtitling groups in Chapter
- Throughout her career, Hu has followed fan communities and fan labor in unruly techno-
logical and capitalistic circumstances (Hu 2004, 2005). Subtitling groups involved in file sharing
and in contractual relations with online streaming platforms occupy a space of affective labor.
Their interests may tentatively align with the state and with businesses, which benefit from the
kind of flexible accumulation the groups allow. Hu’s chapter reminds us that the history of East
Asian popular culture overlaps with the history of deterritorialized cultural labor. Engaging
with a different kind of spatialization, Youna Kim in Chapter 5 provides nuanced narratives of
the diasporic experiences of East Asian sojourners in London. Digitally nested in ethnic media
atmospheres, the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women in Kim’s research harbor nationalistic
yearning and ambivalent feelings towards the diaspora—a location with both cosmopolitan
charm and Western racism. Crucially, Kim’s work underlines affect as something that has greatly
influenced the East Asian cultural imaginary.