Historicizing East Asian pop cultureand Thomas 2004, 9). By contrast, the historical perspective invalidates the question of whether
Asian pop cultures are either imitations or subversive appropriations of American pop culture.
Instead, historical narratives demonstrate that East Asian pop culture is neither antithetical
to nor a reproduction of American pop culture, but rather is constructed inside a culturally
imagined regional boundary within which historical memories and modernizing desires are
shared across national borders (Cho 2011). In particular, the idea of double inscription makes
clear that the distinctive nature of East Asian pop culture has been constructed through its con-
tinuing responses to Euro-American modernity as well as through its continuing interactions
with contemporaneous Asian modernities. Conceptualizations such as iteration and double
inscription are attempts “to scatter the majoritarian dichotomy of the West (theory) and the
Rest (Asia) in order to account for the multiplicity of power/knowledge formation on varie-
gated scales” (Shih 2010, 467).
Finally, the historical narrative compels us to recognize the increasing importance and rich-
ness of inter-Asian referencing in East Asian pop culture. Such a consciously historical approach
enables scholars of Asian cultural studies to juxtapose the differences and similarities of cultural
phenomena both in horizontal and diachronic dimensions, as Iwabuchi argues in the next
chapter. Rather than treating regional pop cultures as mere cases or applying Western theories
to them, inter-Asian referencing heralds the de-Westernization of academia in East Asia. Such a
recognition in East Asian pop culture would be a significant confirmation of Chen and Chua’s
claim that scholars of Asian culture have begun to break free from “West-oriented singularity
and to multiply frames of reference and sites for identification” (2007, 1). Historicizing East
Asian pop culture not only contributes to our knowledge of East Asian pop culture based on
our empirical experiences, but also generates alternative frameworks for the many debates and
discussions that those experiences engender. Meanwhile, “the emergence of strong centers of
Cultural Studies outside the usual Anglo-American world ... challenge[s] the hegemonic posi-
tion of Western voices speaking authoritatively about Asia, and challenge[s] the epistemological
assumptions” (Dutton 2009, 37). It is my hope that this and the other chapters collected in this
handbook continue to contribute to pluralizing both media studies and cultural studies and to
deconstructing the global division of intellectual labor.
Notes
1 For much of the history of Asian Studies, “Asia has not been considered the location or producer of
theory,” and “it has become customary for scholars to apply Western theory to Asian reality or Asian
texts” (Shih 2010, 467). Such a situation is also witnessed in Allen Chun’s story: “I have been to too
many conferences in Asia where ‘we’ Asians complain incessantly about the fact that we are relegated to
the role of local area specialist, while Western area specialists are considered theorists” (2008, 705).
2 Chen (2001) suggests there was a direct relationship between the older, traditional kind of colonialism
and the new Cold War structures that came into existence in Asia after 1945.
3 For example, in the everyday consciousness of South Koreans, America became associated with
anti-communism (Yoshimi 2003).
4 In discussing the cultural intimacy of TV drama, Ang similarly suggests that “in global terms TV drama
since Dallas has not, despite Lang’s fear, become more Americanized”: there has been a “standardization
of format and formula ... but narrative content tends to be locally inflected and locally produced, using
local actors, local idioms and local locations” (2004, 304).
5 Similarly, Meaghan Morris suggests that Hong Kong action films “do not solely derive from the West,”
but their industrial and aesthetic imaginings flow “toward and through Western cinemas as well as
around the region itself ” (2007, 427).
6 Iwabuchi (2004) states that Japanese contemporary culture might have activated cultural exchange and
mutual understanding among youth in East/Southeast Asia on a larger scale than has ever been previ-
ously observed.