Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes

What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of economic pursuits alone, or do cultural and political forces play a role? Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia takes a Cultural Studies approach to the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. The volume opens with an innovative section considering the discipline itself as a kind of cultural industry, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that arise from the context of Northeast Asia. Other essays on specific cultural industries and their products range in coverage from labor in the Korean animation industry to anti-Korean manga in Japan, the emergence of an East Asian brandscape, Chinese consumption of Japanese animation, the Asian regional strategy of the Pusan International Film Festival, and more.

Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Nicola Liscutin is Head of the Japanese Department and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Jonathan D. Mackintosh is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of Lonndon.

“The publication of Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia marks one of the first efforts to address the emergent shape and shaping of a distinctive Northeast Asian cultural sphere in our time and surely represents the best portrayal of the complex tapestry embracing the plural forces of nation, market and cultural industries that is currently constituting this new configuration. From ‘Cool Japan,’ regional ‘brandscapes’ to hybrid forms of animation, politicized cartoons, and regional pop music, these essays explore how cultural studies has expanded its disciplinary vocation to meet the demands of a cultural zone different from the usual suspects and expanded its reach to examine policy and the cultural industries implicated in figuring and producing this new cultural unity. Above all else, the collection authoritatively demonstrates the continuing tension between envisioning a Northeast Asian cultural imaginary as a displacement of older historical grievances capable of exceeding the nation and the more difficult labor of realizing political and economic cooperation among the region’s nations to actualize a new history.” — Harry Harootunian, New York University “This timely and erudite intellectual interrogation of regionalism offers a potent counter-discourse to challenge nation-state boundaries and problematize the binary model of globalism/localism. There is no comparable book on the market.” — Ming-bao Yue, University of Hawai’i at Manoa