TransAsia: Screen Cultures. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. xiii, 183 pp. US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-988-8139-04-0.
Over the past twenty years academia has seen a burgeoning of new research in the areas of cultural studies, pop culture and visual culture. At the same time, “soft power” has increasingly become a keyword not just in academia, but also in mainstream media. Chua Beng Huat, professor of sociology at National University of Singapore, a scholar who has been at the cutting edge of pop culture studies, offers a fascinating exploration of pop culture and soft power at the crossroads of transnational exchange in East Asia. Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture offers a wide-ranging discussion of pop culture—centreing on television idol dramas and popular music, but also drawing on film, newspapers, websites, social media and other sources—as it challenges national borders and creates new fan-based communities.
The geographical scope of the study includes China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Singapore, offering an overview of how East Asian pop culture crosses borders, charting the regional forms that travel, how these exchanges have shifted over the past few decades and exploring why. While individual studies of pop culture in these various regions are increasingly common, Chua Beng Huat’s more comprehensive and embracing approach that brings together scholarship from all of these different regions to trace interconnections, pan-Asian distribution, global audience responses, and the formation of inter-Asia fan cultures is truly cutting edge. Through this approach we are able to better understand the role of pop culture in influencing the geo-political currents of East Asia. While Singapore is often overlooked in many other related studies (indeed, the author acknowledges the city-state’s traditional role as primarily a consumer of pop culture as opposed to a creator), I appreciated the author’s many case studies of Singapore pop culture, such as the discussions of Singapore pop singers who develop their careers in Taiwan and the films of Eric Khoo, which helped better situate Singapore within the context of the Chinese cultural sphere. Particularly eye opening was Chua’s case study comparing regional coverage in the entertainment section of the newspapers United Daily News (Taiwan), Ming Pao (Taiwan), Asahi Shimbum (Japan) and JoongAng Daily (Korea) and seeing side-by-side the radical disparities in different countries’ media coverage of pop culture from other East Asian regions.
Among the book’s theoretical contributions stands the notion of Pop Culture China, which arises out of the author’s discussions of Tu Weiming’s Confucian-based “cultural China” and Shu-mei Shih’s Sinophone. As Chua explains, “The configuration of Pop Culture China is materially and symbolically without center” (39), as it brings together Huaren communities through shared cultural experiences: pop music, films, television dramas, and celebrities who transcend regional boundaries. The attention and detail devoted to various elements of Pop Culture China does, however, ultimately hint at the book’s emphasis on Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore as opposed to Japan and Korea. Examples from Mainland China, which Chua argues “had been and remains essentially a location of consumption of East Asian Pop Culture” (137), are also less robust than I would have expected. Nevertheless, Chua does strike a good balance between the examples he chooses, a difficult task given the amount of material he covers in just over 150 pages. But given the relatively succinct nature of the book, I was surprised by how much repetition is present chapter to chapter; often a single example or statistic is repeated several times throughout the book (which might be useful for teaching purposes, but is otherwise unnecessary). Later, drawing on the work of Joseph Nye, Chua offers a solid overview of notions of soft power and discusses its application to the East Asian context. With examples from Korean dramas like Jewel in the Palaceand Winter Sonata, Japanese anime and manga, and the PRC’s own attempt to harness soft power in the 2000s, the book maps out a fascinating picture of the regional ebbs and tides in pop culture-as-soft power in East Asia.
While there are several interesting case studies of films, entertainment pages from leading East Asian newspapers, and tabloid-level controversies involving Korean pop singers, all of which help anchor the study, the book’s primary contribution comes from its chapters that trace inter-Asian pop culture exchanges from a macro perspective. It is these chapters that allow the book to function as an accessible introduction to the world of East Asian pop culture from a transnational perspective. Written in a highly readable style, featuring numerous examples and case studies that students should be able to easily relate to, and containing quite a few theoretical insights into the interactions between soft power and pop culture, Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture should also serve as a good preliminary textbook to undergraduate and graduate courses on pop culture studies, as well as more focused courses on China pop, the Korean Wave, and Japanese popular culture.
Michael Berry
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
pp. 305-307