Recentering Globalization


Book Description

DIVAn examination of the increased presence of Japanese media and popluar culture in the rest of Asia and the way it has transformed Japanese self-understanding./div




Recentering Globalization


Book Description

DIVAn examination of the increased presence of Japanese media and popluar culture in the rest of Asia and the way it has transformed Japanese self-understanding./div




Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia


Book Description

The common images of Korea view the peninsula as a long-standing battleground for outside powers and the Cold War's last divided state. But, Korea's location at the very center of Northeast Asia gives it a pivotal role in the economic integration of the region and the dynamic development of its more powerful neighbors. A great wave of economic expansion, driven first by the Japanese miracle and then by the ascent of China, has made South Korea - an economic powerhouse in its own right - the hub of the region once again, a natural corridor for railroads and energy pipelines linking Asiatic Russia to China and Japan. And, over the horizon, an opening of North Korea, with multilateral support, would add another major push toward regional integration. Illuminating the role of the Korean peninsula in three modern historical periods, the eminent international contributors to this volume offer a fresh and stimulating appraisal of Korea as the key to the coalescence of a broad, open Northeast Asian regionalism in the twenty-fifth century.




At the Margins of Globalization


Book Description

This book explores how Indigenous Peoples are impacted by globalization and the cult of the individual that often accompanies the phenomenon.




The Pusan International Film Festival, South Korean Cinema and Globalization


Book Description

This book provides a political and cultural exploration of the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea since its inception in 1996. By paying a particular attention to the organizers' use of an Asian regionalization strategy, SooJeong Ahn reveals how the festival staked out a unique and influential position within a rapidly changing global landscape. Very little primary empirical research has been conducted to date on non-Western film festivals, though PIFF and Tokyo and Hong Kong have swiftly grown more exciting and influential as testing grounds for global cinema innovations. The initiation, development and growth of PIFF should be understood as resulting from productive tensions in the festival's efforts to serve local, regional and national constituencies. The book also reflects the complexities of rapid transformation in the South Korean film industry as it has reached out to the global market since the late 1990s. SooJeong Ahn worked for the Pusan International Film Festival between 1998 and 2002 and has completed a Ph.D. on film festivals at the University of Nottingham. Her recent publications include "Re-imagining the Past: Programming South Korean Retrospectives at PIFF," in Film International (Vol. 6, 2008), "Placing South Korean Cinema into Pusan International Film Festival: Programming Strategy in the Global/Local Context," in What a Difference a Region Makes: Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in North-East Asia (2009); "Re-mapping Asian Cinema: The Tenth Anniversary of PIFF in 2005" in Cinemas, Identities and Beyond (2010).







Japan in the Age of Globalization


Book Description

The multiple and diverse forces of globalization have, indeed, affected Japan significantly over the past decades. But so, it must be said, has Japan influenced a variety of critical global developments - globalization is not a one-way street, particularly for a nation as economically influential and technologically advanced as Japan. The chapters in this collection examine the impact of globalization on Japan and the impact of Japan on the forces of globalization from the various disciplinary perspectives of business, the economy, politics, technology, culture and society. They also explain the manner in which the nation has responded to the economic and cultural liberalization that has been such a profound force for change around the globe. This comprehensive collected works brings the latest research to bear on this important subject and provides evidence of the long history of global influences on Japan – and Japanese impacts on the rest of the world. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, Japanese Studies, and Asian Studies.




Empire of Culture


Book Description

Empire of Culture brings together contemporary representations of Victorian Britain to reveal how the nation's imperial past inheres in the ways post-imperial subjects commodify and consume "culture" in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The globalization of English literature, along with British forms of dress, etiquette, and dining, in the nineteenth century presumed and produced the idea that British culture is a universal standard to which everyone should aspire. Examining neo-Victorian texts and practices from Britain, the United States, Japan, and Singapore—from A. S. Byatt's novel Possession and its Hollywood film adaptation to Japanese Lolita fashion and the Lady Victorian manga series—Waiyee Loh argues that the British heritage industry thrives on the persistence of this idea. Yet this industry also competes and collaborates with the US and Japanese cultural industries, as they, too, engage with the legacy of British universalism to carve out their own empires in a global creative economy. Unique in its scope, Empire of Culture centers Britain's engagements with the US and East Asia to illuminate fresh axes of influence and appropriation, and further bring Victorian studies into contact with various sites of literary and cultural fandom.




Tactical Globalization


Book Description

This book is about a small city state's social experiment with globalization. It examines how Singapore conducts its globalization experiment through the state apparatus of schooling and education policy. The author argues that Singapore engages with globalization by anticipating the «problem space» of globalization with calculated actions and experimentation, termed «tactics» and «tactical globalization» in the book. Central to the book is an examination and analysis of the «Thinking Schools, Learning Nation» education policy and reform. While Tactical Globalization contributes to the sociology of globalization by foregrounding new narratives on globalization that are emerging, it also takes a contextual and innovative approach to education policy analysis, which includes a speech-turned-policy document and a nationally televised segment of a documentary called Learning Journeys.




Boys Love Media in Thailand


Book Description

Over the past several years, the Thai popular culture landscape has radically transformed due to the emergence of “Boys Love” (BL) soap operas which celebrate the love between handsome young men. Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture is the first book length study of this increasingly significant transnational pop culture phenomenon. Drawing upon six years of ethnographic research, the book reveals BL's impacts on depictions of same-sex desire in Thai media culture and the resultant mainstreaming of queer romance through new forms of celebrity and participatory fandom. The author explores how the rise of BL has transformed contemporary Thai consumer culture, leading to heterosexual female fans of male celebrities who perform homoeroticism becoming the main audience to whom Thai pop culture is geared. Through the case study of BL, this book thus also investigates how Thai media is responding to broader regional trends across Asia where the economic potentials of female and queer fans are becoming increasingly important. Baudinette ultimately argues that the center of queer cultural production in Asia has shifted from Japan to Thailand, investigating both the growing international fandom of Thailand's BL series as well as the influence of international investment into the development of these media. The book particularly focuses on specific case studies of the fandom for Thai BL celebrity couples in Thailand, China, the Philippines, and Japan to explore how BL series have transformed each of these national contexts' queer consumer cultures.