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Contact the
organizers: Asian Studies Conference (ASCJ) c/o Institute of
Asian Cultural Studies, International Christian University 3-10-2
Osawa, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo 181
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Session 1
Interrogating East Asian Transnationalisms: Film, Television,
Spectatorship
Chair/Organizer: Stephanie DeBoer, University of Southern California
Recent years have witnessed a growing body of literature concerned
with the exchange, flows, and receptions of media as they are
negotiated across borders-flows certainly not new to the world
stage, yet whose more recent configurations are often understood
through "transnational" or "global" discourses
as they interact with the interlocking networks of capital, information,
technology, and images articulated by Arjun Appadurai. The heightened
levels of exchange, cooperation, and co-production among East
Asian media as well increasing presence of East Asian film in
world festival markets over the past few decades certainly reflect
such global "flows within flows." At the same time,
attention to particular (East Asian) locations, configurations,
and discursive contexts seems necessary if we are to explain
with any significance the implications of such transnational
media.
The spectrum of topics represented in this panel-from the "visibility"
of Chinese language films in international festivals, to Japanese
fan discourses on Hong Kong stardom, the reception of Korean
television in Taiwan, and nostalgic production surrounding an
earlier (problematic) "transnational" Japanese film
star-point to the wide range of media, locations, discourses,
and theoretical approaches available to questioning the implications
of media flows within an East Asian context. Yet what links these
papers together is their interest in not simply reproducing academic
theories, but rather interrogating-and occasionally challenging-such
understandings of the transnational in their attention to specific
East Asian locations and texts.
1) Stephanie DeBoer, University of Southern California.
"Reproducing China Nights? Nostalgic Geographies,
Gender, and the Transnational Star"
The emergence of the 1940s female star Li Xianglan (a.k.a. Yamaguchi
Yoshiko/Ri Koran) in a variety of recent East Asian popular culture-nostalgic
reproductions of popular songs, quotes of her figure in film
and television, as well as musicals and conferences that work
to reevaluate (or reproduce the spectacle of) her public figure-highlights
the ambivalent discourses that continue to surround her star
image. On the one hand, they point to the interplay of romance
and (not unproblematic) transnational ideals evoked by her ambiguous
identities as a Manchurian born Japanese national who was advertised
as a Chinese star uniting Japan's wartime colonialist films.
Yet this recent popular (re)production posits her image not only
as a site of reification-of nostalgia for the borderless aura
of this early figure-but also, at other moments, as a point of
interrogation into the transnational ideals that mobilized her
early image in colonialist films.
This paper takes its cues from feminist criticism's observance
of the ambivalent links between gendered bodies and transnational
imaginings in its discussion of the cultural production surrounding
Li Xianglan. Caren Kaplan, for example, suggests how such borderless
fantasies may work to "reify gender through nostalgia or
authenticity" even as they remain potential critical sites
of dissent through readings attentive to their historical contexts.
Nostalgic production surrounding this gendered image thus becomes
a site of contested discourses on (specifically, East Asian)
transnational media as it confronts questions of spectatorship,
location, memory, and history. Such complex and uneven production
further challenges certain uses of the term "transnational"
that continue to reify a monolithic "East" caught only
in its binary against the "West."
2) Lori Hitchcock, Indiana University. "Seeing Stars:
Women Watching Leslie Cheung"
Ever since the Japanese release of Chen Kaige's epic Farewell,
My Concubine, Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing
has enjoyed popularity among Japanese women rivaling that of
Jackie Chan in the 1980s. In films, on stage, and in his public
appearances, Cheung is a paragon of ambiguity-at once local and
global, male and female, public and private. That the specific
meanings of his Japanese reception are largely contingent on
this fluidity suggests the ways in which his star persona offers
a site through which audiences' own identities, within an always
amorphous transnational sphere, themselves may be understood
as ambiguous. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued, practices
of transnational spectatorship manifest a tension between present
(institutional) constraints and "future-oriented" identity
formation; that is, between discrete identities (national, gendered,
sexual, etc.), on the one hand, and those more fluid identities
embodied in Cheung's star image.
This paper examines a variety of fan-produced texts on Cheung-essays,
letters, comics-in order to better understand the various articulations
of Cheung's enigmatic star image with those discursive strands
that traverse and constitute his Japanese audience, revealing
how this image manifests, reflects, and informs practices of
East Asian transnational spectatorship.
3) Chun-Chi Wang, University of Southern California. "Stepping
Out or Stepping Backward?-A Critical View of Television's Transnationalism."
The concept of "global village" has gradually developed
in the post war era. Unsurprisingly, it has also been integrated
into the capitalist system as a major marketing strategy. Television
is never absent in this globalization project-as Michael Curtin
points out, television has been expected to expand audiences
and to promise a shared cultural context that brings citizens
of the world closer together.
Numerous scholars have applied the term "transnational"
to their theoretical discussions, yet with a wide spectrum of
attitudes, from utopianism to distopian pessimism. Because the
definition of transnationalism is not monolithic, it seems not
enough for us to analyze transnationalism only at the level of
recognizing products that cross national boundaries. In other
words, considering the meanings and the impacts of transnationalism
only from a national identity standpoint is somewhat problematic.
In this paper, I will analyze a popular South Korean drama series,
"Endless Love" (lan-se-sheng-si-lian), which
was recently broadcast in Taiwan to challenge certain ideas of
transnationalism and to dismantle its mystification. Along with
'hari' (Japan-phile), the popularity of this drama series is
said to take the lead of 'hahan,' Korean-phile, in Taiwan. Yet,
is "Endless Love" successful because of its specific
characteristics as a South Korean cultural product? I argue that
the popularity of "Endless Love" resulted from: 1)
its melodramatic elements, which resonated with Taiwanese TV
melodramas; 2) its concerns of moral issues, which are shared
by both countries; and 3) the triumph of capitalist commodity
circulation of stars and entertainment business. Furthermore,
I argue it is its well-accepted conservative morality that can
go beyond the differences between the two countries and later
be recognized by both. Transnationalism has not made a breakthrough
into local politics; rather, it may just reassure what happens
locally with another confirmation from overseas.
4) Chia-chi Wu, University of Southern California. "'I
am a Chinese Language Film'-a Preliminary Investigation of East
Asian International Film Festivals in Relation to Chinese Language
Cinemas."
Countering the age-old conception of "seeing" or
"vision" as something rendered possible by a source
of light that casts itself upon and illuminates pre-existing
objects, Michel Foucault re-defines visibility as determined
by an appratus/dispositif, a scopic regime that structures light
in particular ways, demarcates the visible from the invisible,
and dictates what it will bring into light and what it will obscure.
This essay considers international film festivals as such a Foucaultian
apparatus and examines how they have shaped the visibility and
the discourses of Chinese language films made in Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and China. I argue that international film festivals, as venues
of filmic exhibition, cultural forums and market places, constitute
a specific material condition of the global system that facilitates
the participation of Chinese communities in the "global
history of modern visuality." Particularly since the 80s,
international film festivals have simultaneously rendered visible
and prompted the transition of Chinese language films from diasporan
representations that testify political partition and disparate
national/political identities to filmic productions that, under
the trademarks of international auteurs, result from borderless
capitalization.
This essay focuses upon certain international film festivals
in East Asia-Pusan International Film Festival, Tokyo
International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film
Festival, and Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival by
reviewing their programming and publicity materials. In doing
so, it considers film festivals as part of a globalizing cultural
practice. Such a practice entails Chinese communities' coalescence
into the global system of capital and the constitution of trans-Chinese
subjectivity, as implicated in such epithets as three Chinas,
a Greater China, a Cultural China, or cultural nationalism. Certain
issues regarding transnational spectatorship/reception will also
be explored, such as the ways in which the staging of Chinese
language films may override the narratives and give rise to multiple
practices of (mis-) readings; and how the success of certain
Chinese language films in the film festival circuit bespeaks
the text's proximity to the culture and values of the transnational
capitalist class, which is the main audience for festivals.
Discussant: Mary Shuk-han Wong, University of Tokyo
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