5. Popular Cultures in and of and out of Asia

Convenors: Martin Petersen, National Museum of Denmark and Marie Højlund Roesgaard, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen

The panel invites papers from scholars studying popular culture in Asia and the  multidirectional flows of Asian popular cultural products and phenomena over ‘hard’, modern borders especially within Asia, but also between Asia and other regions of the world. Asian popular culture has entered the global scene and Japanese manga, Chinese action films, Korean TV-dramas, Bollywood films and Thai food is now available all over Asia as well as on a global scale. There are discussions of possible ‘soft power’ capabilities of these phenomena while at the same time they also can be elusive in terms of clear national identification. Many phenomena are localized or creolized so Chinese food in India is not what it is in China, and Japanese TV-dramas can be enjoyed by Chinese in spite of political tension between the two countries. Popular culture, while seemingly representing the original host country, also has transnational qualities, the popular culture-landscape of Asia is continuously remade, and centers and peripheries rearranged, through processes of globalization and local co-optation, and the flow and circulation of people, ideas and objects.

The panel will focus on the implications of such processes, their historical and contemporary contingencies and welcomes papers, which theorize alternative temporalities, spatialities and modernities and which seek epistemological grounding in conceptualizations of interaction and flow in relation to popular culture in Asia.