From Bollywood to Hong Kong, and more recently the Korean Wave, the fluidity and hybridity characterising popular culture flows is becoming a subject of scholarship on Asia. Moving away from the immutability of Orientalist and nationalist interpretations, the study of popular culture in the region has turned into the search for more cosmopolitan identities reinforced by transnational engagements. In case studies on performance, transmissions and fandoms, the politics of representation, appropriation and imaginations are being played out in such interactions across otherwise diverse societies.
Popular culture co-productions and collaborations in East and Southeast Asia is one of the more recent edited volumes in this scholarly undertaking. Based on a workshop held at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in December 2008, a total of eleven chapters in the project cover a broad range of topics from film and public monuments to icons of material culture such as rice cookers. Setting the stage for the conceptualisation of media regionalisations and regionalisms in this volume is Nissim Otmazgin's argument for the need to legitimise popular culture formations as a critical tool for understanding East and Southeast Asian identities that may not be detected by conventional geopolitical theories. This is followed by several chapters delving into case-studies into the changing landscapes and economies of transnational and trans-local co-productions and collaborations by Shim Doobo, Caroline S. Hau and Takashi Shiraishi, Lisa Leung Yuk Ming, and Shin Hyunjoon on Korean, Hong Kong, and Chinese films as well as popular music. Driven by principally pragmatic financial considerations rather than ideological ambitions, industry players — with increasingly active government support — are matching talent and expertise with capital and infrastructure to economise on the cost of productions as well as ride on existing regional cultural trends.
With case studies of the Philippines by Rolando B. Tolentino and Indonesia by Abidin Kusno, in addition to rice cookers by Yoshiko Nakano, fan subculture groups by Kelly Hu and the Yasukuni Shrine by Rob Efird, this volume is not dominated by trendy topics. On the contrary, it is the detailed historical treatment of the revamping of the ‘Made in Japan’ rice cookers for the Hong Kong market since the 1960s that distinguishes Nakano's contribution to this volume. A similar scholarly rigour is evident in Kusno's account of the shifting typecasting of Chinese popular literature in Indonesia during the repressive era of Suharto. Whereas the Orientalising discourses of otherwise heroic martial artists like Bruce Lee have been widely discussed, Kusno has layered his discussion with a striking comparison between Taiwanese boy groups like F4 and the Taiwanese adaptation of the Japanese manga, Boys before flowers.
Addressing the fundamental agenda of cultural studies, Kusno points out an observation by a non-Chinese fan of the film Meteor Garden poignantly reflecting on the possibilities of such cultural transmissions in creating the imaginations of a shared humanity: ‘A film like Meteor Garden has made the image of China look more “humanistic.” Chinese people are like us and everyone else. In the everyday life they have also encountered problems that we all have, such as the complexity of friendship, love and economic difficulties. In fact, the world of Chinese Kung Fu appears only in films.’ More than the infrastructure of cultural co-production and institutional collaboration, it is in the ability of popular culture to stir imagination and inspiration that makes such undertakings significant. Overall, while bringing its readers up-to-date on the rapid changes in popular culture in East and Southeast Asia, this volume also reveals new dimensions in cultural studies of the region.
