Popular Culture Co-Productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia

In recent years, popular culture production in East and Southeast Asia has undergone major changes with the emergence of a system that organizes and relocates production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Freed from the constraints associated with autonomous national economies, popular culture has acquired a transnational character and caters to multinational audiences. Using insights drawn from a number of academic disciplines, the authors in this wide-ranging volume consider the implications of a region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles in the production of movies, music, comics, and animation. They also investigate the regional economics of transcultural production, considering cultural imaginaries in the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural goods and images. Where scholarship on popular culture conventionally explores the "meaning" of texts, Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia draws on empirical studies of the culture industries of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, and use a regional framework to analyze the consequences of co-production and collaboration.