It is widely acknowledged that creativity is emerging as one of the most important sources of economic growth. This book investigates the varied forms of the creative and cultural industries including the arts, culture, film, design and other related fields. In this book, the chapters showcase new research insights into the recent growth of the creative and cultural industries, which can be located across the intersection of the arts and humanities, business studies and social science disciplines. The contributors provide rich empirical insights about the creative and cultural industries of, related to and connected with South Asia, both from across its diasporas and from around the world. This includes a variety of illustrative examples of creativity from the Bollywood film industry, to the growth of the creative sector in countries like the UK, India and Bangladesh, making the book an engaging read for anyone who is interested to learn more. Using contemporary and fresh examples from South Asia and its diasporas, South Asian Creative and Cultural Industries offers new research perspectives on a growing and important region of the world. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Popular Culture journal.

This book presents an introductory overview of the socio-economic organization of creative industries, focusing on the East Asian context. Establishing a theoretical framework founded on the work of Richard Caves, Howard Becker, and Pierre Bourdieu, this textbook is an accessible introduction to creative and cultural industries. Drawing on examples from Japan, South Korea, and China, it both examines what is unique about cultural production in these countries and places them in a global and intercultural context. Building on themes of uncertainty and networks of cooperation, Brian Moeran looks at the role of social ties in defining notions of quality. He then analyses the positioning of individual actors, organisations, and commodities in each field of cultural production and the exchanges of economic and symbolic capital that take place between them. Examples are taken from a range of cultural and creative industries, including film, music and fashion. Overall, Creative and Cultural Industries in East Asia serves as a foundational introduction to the study of creative and cultural production in East Asia.

Recent years have witnessed the remarkable development of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in Asia, from the global popularity of the Japanese games and anime industries, to Korea’s film and pop music successes. While CCIs in these Asian cultural powerhouses aspire to become key players in the global cultural economy, Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand are eager to make a strong mark in the region’s cultural landscape. As the first handbook on CCIs in Asia, this book provides readers with a contextualized understanding of the conditions and operation of Asian CCIs. Both internationalising and de-Westernising our knowledge of CCIs, it offers a comprehensive contribution to the field from academics, practitioners and activists alike. Covering 12 different societies in Asia from Japan and China to Thailand, Indonesia and India, the themes include: State policy in shaping CCIs Cultural production inside and outside of institutional frameworks Circulation of CCIs products and consumer culture Cultural activism and independent culture Cultural heritage as an industry. Presenting a detailed set of case studies, this book will be an essential companion for researchers and students in the field of cultural policy, cultural and creative industries, media and cultural studies, and Asian studies in general.

The experience of Hong Kong’s innovative and creative industries and the challenges they face serves as an important case study for other Chinese and Asian cities that are actively developing their innovative and creative industries in the era of globalization. The return of sovereignty over Hong Kong back to China in 1997 has led to both collaboration and competition between the two places in innovative and creative sectors for the Greater China and Asian Regions. Hong Kong has remained unique in spite of the integration, but she has to strike a delicate balance between being simultaneously a Chinese and an international city. This book looks at different innovative and creative industries, such as international art and culture exhibition, innovative technology, digital entertainment, TV and movies, as well as government policy for innovative and creative industries, particularly the changing competitive landscape brought about by the latest Great Bay Area development. Drawing insights from cultural history, innovation economics, cultural policy studies, and cultural geography, this book explores the opportunities and challenges of Hong Kong's innovative and creative industries, in particular after the change of sovereignty in 1997. It demonstrates that the city’s legacy, and heavy government input in capital, do not guarantee their sustainable development. This is a book not only for policymakers or academics interested in innovative and creative industries but also to students contemplating a career in these areas in Hong Kong, the Greater China and the Asian Region.

This book investigates economic, political, and cultural conditions that have led to transnational flows of culture in Asia. Coverage also looks at the consequences of an increasingly interconnected Asian regional culture as well as policy makers and cultural industries' response to it. The book features essays written by researchers from different countries in Asia and beyond with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The volume also contains engaging examples and cases with comparative perspectives. The contributors provide readers with grounded analysis in the organizational and economic logics of Asian creative industries, national cultural policies that promote or hinder cultural flows, and the media convergence and online consumers' surging demand for Asianized cultural products. Such insights are of crucial importance for a better understanding of the dynamics of transnational cultural flows in contemporary Asia. In addition, the essays aim to “de-westernize” the study of cultural and creative industries, which draws predominantly on cases in the United States and Europe. The contributors focus instead on regional dynamics of the development of these industries. The popularity of J-Pop and K-Pop in East and Southeast Asia (and beyond) is now well known, but less is known about how this happened. This volume offers readers theoretical tools that will help them to make better sense of those exciting phenomena and other rising cultural flows within Asia and their relevance to the global cultural economy.

This book examines the vast and largely uncharted world of cultural/creative city-making in Asia. It explores the establishment of policy models and practices against the backdrop of a globalizing world, and considers the dynamic relationship between powerful actors and resources that impact Asian cities. Making Cultural Cities in Asia approaches this dynamic process through the lens of assemblage: how the policy models of cultural/creative cities have been extracted from the flow of ideas, and how re-invented versions have been assembled, territorialized, and exported. This approach reveals a spectrum between globally circulating ideals on the one hand, and the place-based contexts and contingencies on the other. At one end of the spectrum, this book features chapters on policy mobility, in particular the political construction of the "web" of communication and the restructuring or rescaling of the state. At the other end, chapters examine the increasingly fragmented social forces, their changing roles in the process, and their negotiations, alignments, and resistances. This book will be of interest to researchers and policy-makers concerned with cultural and urban studies, creative industries and Asian studies.

Over the past 20 years we have seen critical design studies emerge as a springboard for scholars, activists, and those working in the creative industries. Design studies has enabled critics to link the relationship between constructions of knowledge and the emotional commitments that both practitioners and audiences bring to the making and uses of design work. A critical focus on these practices can reveal issues such as the distribution of power and emotional evocations and experiences in and through different designs. At the same time, the use of design studies has drawn on diverse fields such as art history, architecture, public policy, and Geographic Information Systems. This collected volume, the first of its kind, engages with these fields of critical inquiry with ideas and debates in post-colonial studies, and in media and cultural studies. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia. The chapters pose questions about colonial history, colonial and postcolonial cultural practices, and the aestheticization of South Asian art, design, and media forms as they inform identities in a deterritorialized global culture. The sites of the investigation by the contributors reflect the interdisciplinarity of design studies and share the insistence on emphasizing the vernacular: Indian fashion design, lithographic design in Muslim princely states, and Indian floor drawings live alongside museum exhibitions, shopping malls, and film spaces. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.