This pivot considers the history, methodology and practice of Asian theatre and investigates the role of Asian theatre and film in contemporary transnational Asian identities. It critically reviews the topics of transnationalism and intercultural political difference, arguing that the concept of Transnational Asian theatre or 'TransAsia' can promote cultural diversity and social transformation. The book notably offers an understanding of theatre as a cultural laboratory, a repository for diverse histories and a forum for intercultural dialogue, allowing for a better understanding of sociocultural patterns surrounding transnational Asian identity and mobility.
This book is about K-pop dance and the evolution and presence of its dance fandom on social media. Based on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, choreography, and participation-observation with 40 amateur and professional K-pop dancers in New York, California, and Seoul, the book traces the evolution of K-pop dance from the 1980s to the 2020s and explains its distinctive feature called ‘gestural point choreography’ – front-driven, two-dimensional, decorative and charming movements of the upper body and face – as an example of what the author theorizes as ‘social media dance.’ It also explores K-pop cover dance as a form of intercultural performance, suggesting that, by imitating and idolizing K-pop dance, fans are eventually ‘fandoming’ themselves and their bodies. Presenting an ethnographic study of K-pop dance and its fandom, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Media Studies, Korean Studies, Performance Studies, and Dance.
"Like many states emerging from oppressive political rule, Taiwan saw a cultural explosion in the late 1980s, when four decades of martial law under the Chinese National Party ended. As a multicultural, multilingual society with a complicated history of migration and colonization, Taiwanese people met their political transformation and newfound freedom with a host of stories waiting to be told and identities longing for expression. In Renegade Rhymes, ethnomusicologist Meredith Schweig shows how rap music has become a powerful outlet for exploring the complicated ethnic, cultural, and political history of Taiwan. Schweig draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to explain how rap's storytelling component became such a vital tool for working out Taiwanese identity and grappling with cultural history. She takes readers to rap festivals, music video sets, hip-hop clubs, and creative collectives in which members participate in rap battles and study under an experienced teacher. As Schweig shows, MCs from marginalized ethnic groups in Taiwan seized on this music of resistance, infusing it with important aspects of their own local identities, languages, and storytelling traditions. We see how these musicians localize rap as a way to challenge longstanding political mythologies and redeem individual and community narratives from the totalizing influence of government and commercial interests. Working against holes in the educational system and a neoliberal economy, new generations of rappers have used the artform to nurture associational bonds and rehearse rituals of democratic citizenship, making a new kind of sense out of their complicated present"--
With joy and grace to accompany the readers to have the translocal tour to visit about thirty-seven works, this monograph applies the academic critical theories of Performance Studies, Film Studies, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and Visual Culture, to interpreting the special selection works. The focus and common theme are on race, body, and class. With the background of COVID-19 since 2019 up to the present, the book offers the readers with the remarkable insight of human beings’ accumulated wisdom and experiences in surviving with the dreadful diseases like the plagues in Shakespeare’s time. After the supreme reading, may the global readers in the world acquire the knowledge and power to live in sustainability with education and entertainment of films, performances, and online streaming Netflix TV dramas.
This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.
Applying the theories of Popular Culture, Visual Culture, Performance Studies, (Post)Feminism, and Film Studies, this interdisciplinary and well-crafted book leads you to the fascinating and intriguing world of popular film, (musical) theatre, and TV drama. It explores the classical and contemporary cases of the literature works, both Eastern and Western, adapted, represented and transformed into the interesting artistic medium in films, performances, TV dramas, musicals, and AI robot theatre/films. ‘Iris Tuan’s book is wide ranging in scope and diversity, examining theatre, music, film and television productions from both Western and Asian countries. Tuan also surveys an extensive range of critical and theoretical perspectives, especially from performance studies and popular cultural studies, to offer context for her descriptions of the many different works. Some of her examples are well-known (Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Disney’s The Lion King) while others little known outside their place of origin (such as the Hakka Theatre of Taiwan) -- all are approached by the author with enthusiasm.’ —Susan Bennett, Professor of English, University of Calgary, Canada ‘Tuan takes us through multiple examples of contemporary popular performance in theatre/film/TV ranging from "high" art sources (Shakespeare or Journey to the West in films, Hirata's robotic theatre experiments) to "low" (Taiwanese TV soap operas Hakka Theatre: Roseki and Story of Yangxi Palace, Korean film Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds). The reader moves at a speed-dating pace through contemporary culture production and interpretive theories, encountering significant works, controversies (i. e., yellow face), and conundrums selected from China, Korea, Japan and the U. S. and filtered through a Taiwanese female gaze.’ —Kathy Foley, Professor of Theatre Arts, University of California Santa Cruz, USA
Since the late 1990s, Asian nations have increasingly encouraged, facilitated, or demanded the return of emigrants. In this interdisciplinary collection, distinguished scholars from countries around the world explore the changing relations between nation-states and transnational mobility. Taking into account illegally trafficked migrants, deportees, temporary laborers on short-term contracts, and highly skilled émigrés, the contributors argue that the figure of the returnee energizes and redefines nationalism in an era of increasingly fluid and indeterminate national sovereignty. They acknowledge the diversity, complexity, and instability of reverse migration, while emphasizing its discursive, policy, and political significance at a moment when the tensions between state power and transnational subjects are particularly visible. Taken together, the essays foreground Asia as a useful site for rethinking the intersections of migration, sovereignty, and nationalism. Contributors. Sylvia Cowan, Johan Lindquist, Melody Chia-wen Lu, Koji Sasaki, Shin Hyunjoon, Mariko Asano Tamanoi, Mika Toyota, Carol Upadhya, Wang Cangbai, Xiang Biao, Brenda S. A. Yeoh
As globalisation deepens, student mobility and migration has not only impacted economy and institutions, it has also infused human desires, imaginaries, experiences and subjectivities. In Transnational Students and Mobility, Hannah Soong portrays the vexed nexus of education and migration as a site of multiple tensions and existence and examines how the notion of imagined mobility through education-migration nexus transforms the social value of international education and transnational mobility.
What does the ‘Asian’ mean in Asian sport celebrity? With a collection of nine essays on Asian sport celebrities variously associated with Australia, Belgium, China, Japan, New Zealand, North Korea, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the multi-faceted construction of what it means to be Asian from the perspectives of race, ethnicity and regionality. Sport celebrity, as a modern invention, is disseminated from the West to the rest of the globe including Asia, and so are its functions of symbolizing particular values, desires and personalities idolized and idealized within their respective societies. While Asian athletes were historically depicted as weak, fragile and biologically ‘unsuited’ to modern sport, the emergence of more than a few world-class Asian athletes in the twenty-first century demands an in-depth inquiry into the relationship between sport celebrity and the representation of Asia. This book is therefore essential for those interested in a range of socio-cultural issues—including globalization, transnationalism, migration, modernity, (post-)coloniality, gender politics, spectacle, citizenship, Orientalism, and nationalism—within and beyond Asia. It was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
This book makes a significant contribution to interdisciplinary engagements between Theatre Studies and Cultural Geography in its analysis of how theatre articulates transnational geographies of Asian culture and identity. Deploying a geographical approach to transnational culture, Rogers analyses the cross-border relationships that exist within and between Asian American, British East Asian, and South East Asian theatres, investigating the effect of transnationalism on the construction of identity, the development of creative praxis, and the reception of works in different social fields. This book therefore examines how practitioners engage with one another across borders, and details the cross-cultural performances, creative opportunities, and political alliances that result. By viewing ethnic minority theatres as part of global — rather than simply national — cultural fields, Rogers argues that transnational relationships take multiple forms and have varying impetuses that cannot always be equated to diasporic longing for a homeland or as strategically motivated for economic gain. This argument is developed through a series of chapters that examine how different transnational spatialities are produced and re-worked through the practice of theatre making, drawing upon an analysis of rehearsals, performances, festivals, and semi-structured interviews with practitioners. The book extends existing discussions of performance and globalization, particularly through its focus on the multiplicity of transnational spatiality and the networks between English-language Asian theatres. Its analysis of spatially extensive relations also contributes to an emerging body of research on creative geographies by situating theatrical praxis in relation to cross-border flows. Performing Asian Transnationalisms demonstrates how performances reflect and rework conventional transnational geographies in imaginative and innovative ways.
