This book examines the nexus of East Asian media, culture, and digital technologies in the early 21st century from a Global South perspective. Providing an empirically rich analysis of the emergence of Asian culture, histories, texts, and state policies as they relate to both Asian media and global media, the author discusses relevant theoretical frameworks as East Asian popular culture and media have shifted the contours of globalization. After overviewing Western media/cultural theories and histories, the book explores the ways in which East Asia-focused analytical frameworks are able to shift people’s understanding of globalization and media, drawing upon examples from different East Asian countries to illustrate how current cultural flows have influenced and have been influenced by a handful of dimensions. Offering an important contribution to understanding the historical trajectory and recent developments of East Asia media, this book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology.

East Asia is a powerhouse of economic and social development, with cultural industries that have burgeoned as countries in the region have generated consumer economies and a middle class. Despite ongoing security tensions, growing evidence suggests that a vigorous cultural trade in such commodities as comics, cinema and TV drama is creating a shared regional popular culture. The widespread diffusion of the Internet, and the concomitant rise of non-professional online publishing and social networking, is creating new communities among the consumers of these cultural commodities. Rivalry for leadership in the sphere of the culture industries provides a fertile field for the study of soft market power versus hard political power. The competing national discourses of the 'Korean Wave' (hallyu) and Japan's 'Gross National Cool' indicate a struggle for new forms of influence in the East Asian region, a struggle that is becoming more intense as China, too, starts to exert soft power influence on a global scale in the form of cultural industries and foreign aid. Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia addresses transnational production and consumption of media products such as cinema, television dramas, popular music, comics and animation in Japan, South Korea and China. Its multidisciplinary approaches include cultural studies, gender studies, media studies, and a content analysis of the popular discourse of otherness in the East Asian context. While suggesting the emergence of a shared East Asian popular consumer culture, it critically examines the proposition that such a shared popular culture can resolve tensions between nation-states, and highlights the appropriation of popular culture by nation-states in an attempt to exercise soft power. Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia will be of interest to researchers and students in Asian Studies, Cultural Studies and Media Studies, and will be particularly useful to researchers in the emerging area of Inter-Asian Cultural Studies.

This volume examines international engagement with Korean popular culture in East Asian online spaces, and how Asian identities are formed and perceived between nations within the region. In the context of global diversification and growing public participation in global issues, it builds up a new theoretical perspective in order to explain the emerging power of Asia in the global mediascape. With a focus on Korean media, touching upon K-pop and the phenomenon of Hallyu and anti-Hallyu, the author also looks at Japan, China, and Taiwan in this regional study. Combining theory with ethnographic audience studies in East Asian countries, the book elucidates East Asian media in a larger context of the changing global structure and media technology. This book will interest academics and students working on Asian popular culture and media, new media, East Asian studies, participatory media, and digital communication.

'South Asian Media Cultures' examines a wide range of media cultures and practices from across South Asia, using a common set of historical, political and theoretical engagements. In the context of such pressing issues as peace, conflict, democracy, politics, religion, class, ethnicity and gender, these essays explore the ways different groups of South Asians produce, understand and critique the media available to them.

What does the notion of the ‘global south’ mean to media studies today? This book interrogates the possibilities of global thinking from the south in the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Through lenses of millennial media cultures, it refocuses the praxis of the global south in relation to the established ideas of globalization, development, and conditions of postcoloniality. Bringing together original empirical work from media scholars from across the global south, the volume highlights how contemporary thinking about the region as theoretical framework ・ an emerging area of theory in its own right ・ is incomplete without due consideration being placed on narrative forms, both analogue and digital, traditional and sub-cultural. From news to music cultures, from journalism to visual culture, from screen forms to culture-jamming, the chapters in the volume explore contemporary popular forms of communication as manifested in diverse global south contexts. A significant contribution to cultural theory and communications research, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of media and culture studies, literary and critical theory, digital humanities, science and technology studies, and sociology and social anthropology.

This book illustrates a distinctive lineage of critical interventions in moving image culture and in the public sphere through the trajectories of a small number of film and video organizations established between the 1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America mainly by women and still operative today. The six case studies examined (Drac Màgic, Women Make Movies, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Leeds Animation Workshop, bildwechsel, Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) have maintained a discrete yet continuing presence within an audiovisual industry and a cultural system dominated by institutionalized and corporate forms of production and distribution. Their longevity – quite a rarity in the independent circuit – makes a strong case for the sustainability of feminist/LGBTQ media activism in the public sphere, in spite of its low-key profile. This volume will be of interest to academicians of history and communication studies, feminist and LGBTQ topics, and gender-related cinematic culture.