Intra-Regional Pop Cultural Flows

"Regionally circulated popular culture is now an indispensable part of the average East Asian's daily life. The magnitude, dynamics, and wide spatial coverage of the cultural "flow" signify its potential to become a powerful vehicle for bringing to life the 1998 ASEAN-Plus-Three Summit's vision statement on an integrated East Asian community. Yet the creative industry-produced popular culture flows and the resulting immense number of intra-regional contacts at the people-to-people level may also trigger instantaneous and massive nationalist responses to any imported cultural program. The impact of cross-border popular cultural flows on East Asians' competing national selves, and the potential of translating pleasure from popular cultural consumption into regional integration urges are thus issues carrying political significance and consequence for East Asia, and possibly with serious repercussions on the world. To contribute towards a comprehensive understanding of the junction between the ever dense cross-border cultural traffic and an incipient East Asian identity, this edited volume brings together eleven scholars from eight countries to explore interactions of popular cultural flows, state politics, audiences' receptions, and public debates in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam and China, and across the region as a whole. These investigations provide fresh conceptual and empirical insights into the study of the dynamic and complex interface of cultural adaptation, political identification and regional identity formation in the pop cultural consumption process in East Asia"--