East Asian stars, public space, and star studiesand affective prophets” whom individuals in societies look up to in an effort to make sense of
their worlds through the rationalizing process of modernization. The power of these stars stems
from their on-screen subjectivities, which appear as various types of individualities and person-
alities. They function as the will and expression of particular social groups and invite affective
investment from these groups. Their public personas are hence “hyperindividuals,” continuously
articulating transitional legitimate identification and cultural values. Various social values and
identities (attribute to) formulate and mediate through the hyperindividuals. The public figures
are fundamentally ambiguous despite their temporary attachment to particular identities and
values because they function as public spheres allowing all types of discourses, which concern
values, identities and individualities, to configure, to position and to proliferate in contemporary
society. From a Gramscian viewpoint, the cultural value and meaning of stars is always evolving
as a result of the dynamic hegemony between ruling groups and subordinate groups. In this way,
the public personalities form a link between collective configurations and the mass populace.
The American-oriented star studies are useful when analyzing the role of the star in a society
within a nation-based framework and how the stars’ image articulates specific trends in a spa-
tially and politically bounded society. However, the nationally bounded theories do not accom-
modate for the spatial and topological difference of a star’s image when that star crosses borders
to work in a different national media, despite the fact that the industrial phenomenon has never
been rare in contemporary film and television history, due to its methodological nationalism in
the social sciences (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003).
This approach to stardom has inspired scholarship in other countries to pay attention to
their own star systems, such as the edited volume of Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang (2010)
on Chinese film stars, and the work of Neepa Majumdar (2009) on Indian film stars. Farquhar
and Zhang’s anthology examines cases of stardom in three imagined communities in China,
Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The analysis concentrates on the relations of stars/societies but does
not acknowledge the dynamism between the stars images, although some of the stars have
moved between different Chinese-language media, such as Brigitte Lin, Chow Yun-Fat, and
Jet Li.
The geographic–spatial dimension of stardom in the Hollywood star system has not been
completely overlooked in the United States. Rather, it has been contextually directed to ethnic
and racial issues, for both epistemological and empirical reasons. Epistemologically, most of the
critical energies in the white-centered yet multicultural Western societies have been directed
towards class, racial and gender politics, and stereotypical representations in the images systems.
Research on Jackie Chan’s Hollywood career exemplifies this type of questioning (Gallagher
2004; Park, Gabbadon, and Chernin 2006). Lo Kwai-Cheung (2001) insightfully notes the dif-
ference in Chan’s persona in Hong Kong as compared to Hollywood. Comparatively, cultural
identity issues of white actors from outside of the United States pursuing a career in Hollywood
has not been theoretically identified in the West as a serious matter of contention. The indiffer-
ence is fathomable, given that white-dominant Western societies seemed to have already come
to an age of post-ethnic multiculturalism.
Empirically, Hollywood is at the center of the contemporary world of image-making, owing
to its global dominance for more than half a century. The stage in Hollywood is believed to be
the biggest and most universal, enjoying worldwide popularity and influence. The entertainment
industry in the most powerful media/star system has incorporated other smaller and marginal
media/star systems. Hollywood regularly employs talents and other means of production from
other media/star systems in the world, especially those in the other five main English- speaking
countries (Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand). Pursuing a
career in Hollywood has been considered a path to upward mobility in a star’s career. Although