Global Cultures and Media Flows in Asia
ATS 3627
Carolyn Stevens
Monash University
This unit’s narrative
This unit is divided into three sections. Each section tells a story of how global culture transgresses the borders, and how producers and consumers interact, and the role of the media in these interactions.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 2
Key words: tradition, authenticity, and modernity, but most importantly, how these three interact in our understanding of what is a global culture (and what is not). Our case study is about Japanese department stores, past and present.
Required readings:
Meyer-Ohle, Hendrik. 2018. 'Post Bubble Japanese Department Stores: The Need to Search for New Paradigms' in Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. & Ewa Machotka (eds), Consuming Life in Post- Bubble Japan: A Transdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 31-48.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1993. ‘Introduction: Inventing traditions’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. pp. 1-14
Further readings: Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. Simulacres et Simulation [Simulacra and Simulation]. Éditions Galilée.
Stevens, Carolyn S. 2008. Japanese Popular Music: culture, authenticity and power. London: Routledge, especially pp. 24–36.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 3
Key terms: hard power, soft power, international relations, diplomacy. This week introduces some basic IR concepts that will help us make sense of both past and present developments in global culture. Our case study this week is the Korean wave.
Required reading: Lee, Sanjoon. 2015. 'A Decade of Hallyu Scholarship: Toward a New Direction in Hallyu 2.0', in Lee and Nornes (eds) Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media, University of Michigan Press, pp. 1-27; for the purposes of this week's assignments, just read pps 1-16 or if you're really pushed for time, 8-16.
Nye, Joseph. 2021. 'Soft power: the evolution of a concept', Journal of Political Power, 14(1): 196–208.
Further readings: Allison, Anne. 2009. ‘The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth’, Theory Culture and Society, 26(2–3): 89–111.
Daliot-Bul, Michal. 2009. ‘Japan Brand Strategy: The Taming of “Cool Japan” and the Challenges of Cultural Planning in a Postmodern Age’, Social Science Japan Journal, 12(2): 247–266.
McGray, Douglas. 2002. “Japan's Gross National Cool”, Foreign Policy, May/June, 45-54. Access this here at https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/11/11/japans-gross-national-cool/
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Week by Week lecture topics and readings 4
Key terms: globalisation versus domestification / glocalisation; borders; media convergence. Our case study is Korean beauty culture in China.
Required readings: Davies, Gloria and Gil-Soo Han (2011) ‘Pan-Asian by Design: cosmetic surgery in Korea and digital publicity,’ Media International Australia, No 141: 146-56.
Iwabuchi, Kôichi. 2002. ‘Taking Japanization Seriously: Cultural Globalization Reconsidered.’ in Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke UP, pp. 23-50.
Further readings: Choo, Kukhee (2013) ‘Playing the Global Game: Japan Brand and Globalization’. In Anthony Y.H. Fung ed. Asian Popular Culture: the Global Discontinuity. 213-229. Available as e-book at Monash Library.
Otmazgin, Nissim K. 2008. 'Japanese Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia: Time for a Regional Paradigm?.' Asia Pacific Journal/Japan Focus, Vol 6 Issue 2, http://apjjf.org/-Nissim-Kadosh-Otmazgin/2660/article.html
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 5
Key terms: cultural / food diffusion; foodways; cosmopolitianism, global commons. Our case study is the ubiquity of Asian food culture in US/Australia/Canada [insert home culture].
Required Readings: Mintz, Sidney. 2007. “Asia's contributions to world cuisine” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, tradition and cooking, Cheung and Tan (eds), New York: Routledge, 201-211.
Rousseau, Signe. 2012. Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference. Oxford: Berg, 5- 20.
Further Readings: Phillipov, Michelle. 2017. Media and Food Industries : the New Politics of Food. Palgrave MacMillan.
Tam, S. M. 2007. “Convenient-involvement foods and the family meal in South China” in Food and Foodways in Asia: Resource, tradition and cooking, Cheung and Tan (eds), New York: Routledge, 67-82.
Watson, James L. (ed) 2006 (2nd ed). Golden Arches East : McDonald's in East Asia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Wu, David Y. H. and Sidney C. H. Cheung (eds) 2002. The Globalization of Chinese Food. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 6
Key terms: media; media flows; Networked Society; media convergence; affordance and freedom; publicness and censorship. Our case study is the ‘Great Firewall of China’
Required Reading: Davies, Gloria. 2016. 'Chinese social media, "publicness" and one-party rule", in Hjorth and Khoo (eds) Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, London: Routledge, 167-178.
Turkle, Sherry and Chaudhury, Shoma. 2012. 'The Republic of Technology', a conversation, THiNK 2012 (an annual event in India sponsored by Telheka magazine) http://thinkworks.in/speakers/sherry-turkle/
Further reading: Castells, Manuel. 2010. 2nd edition. ‘The culture of real virtuality: The integration of electronic communication, the end of the mass audience, and the rise of interactive networks’, from The Rise of Network Society
Goldkorn, Jeremy. 2015. 'The Chinese Internet - Unshared Destiny' in Barme, Jaivin and Goldkorn, eds. China Story Yearbook 2014: Shared Destiny, ANU Press. https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2014/
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 7
Key terms: netizen; internet activism; convergence of personal and public lives. Our case study is the triple disasters of March 2011, Tohoku, Japan.
Required Reading: Kindstrand, L., K. Nishimura and D.H. Slater 2016. 'Mobilizing discontent: social media and networked activist since the Great East Japan Earthquake', in Hjorth and Khoo (eds) Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, London: Routledge, 53-65.
van Dijck, José. 2013. 'Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity', in The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media, Oxford Scholarship online, pp. 1-32.
Further reading: Menz, Cade. 2016. 'The Inside Story of How FaceBook is Transforming Disaster Response', Wired (Online).
Sun, Jing. 2012. Japan and China as Charm Rivals: Soft Power in Regional Diplomacy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 8
Key terms: Protection of Intellectual property rights (IPR), market dominance, copyright protection. Our case study is Taiwan fans of Japanese television dramas.
Required Reading: Hu, Kelly. 2005. “The Power of Circulation: Digital Technologies and the online Chinese fans of Japanese TV Drama”, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6(2):171–186.
Lobato, Ramon. 2012. ‘The Six Faces of Piracy’ in Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 69-94.
Further reading: Lobato, Ramon and Julian Thomas. 2015. The Informal Media Economy. London: Polity.
Karaganis, Joe (ed). 2011. Media Piracy in Emerging Economies. NY: Social Science Research Council.
Kavita, Philip. 2005. "What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property." Postcolonial Studies 8 (2): 199-218.
Pang, Laikwan. 2006. Cultural control and globalization in Asia: copyright, piracy, and cinema. London: Routledge.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 9
Key terms: the tourist gaze, Orientalism, nostalgia; revisiting anomie from week 3. Our case studies are tourist experiences in SE Asia (Thailand and Indonesia)
Required reading: Mackie, Vera. 2000. “The Metropolitan Gaze: Travellers, Bodies and Spaces”, Intersections, vol. 4. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue4/vera.html
Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, pp. 1-15.
Further reading: Hiwasaki, L. (2000). 'Ethnic Tourism in Hokkaido and the Shaping of Ainu Identity', Pacific Affairs, 73(3):393-412.
Larsen, Jonas (2014) 'The Tourist Gaze 1.0, 2.0, 3.0' from the Wiley Companion to Tourism
Yamashita, Shinji. (2003). “Space and Time Under the Tourist Gaze” in Bali and Beyond: Explorations in the Anthropology of Tourism, New York and Oxford, 13-22.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 10
Key terms: nationalism, essentialisation, imagined communities. The reading's case study features expressions of 20th century Australian nationalism in popular film as framed as 'difference' to the Asian nations that surround it.
Required Reading: Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 1-7.
Khoo, Olivia. 2006. ‘Telling Stories: The Sacrificial Asian in Australian Cinema’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 27(1-2):45-63.
Further reading: Hage, Ghassan. 2002. ‘Multiculturalism and White Paranoia in Australia’, Journal of International Migration and Integration, 3(3): 417-437.
Hannerz, Ulf. 2005. ‘The Withering Away of the Nation?’ in The Global History Reader, Mazlish and Iriye (eds), London: Routledge, 209-220.
Hellman, Jörgen. 2003. Performing the Nation: Cultural Politics in New Order Indonesia. Denmark: Nias Press, 13-50.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 11
Key terms: cultural appropriation, pastiche (an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another artist or style; in this case, of another culture). This week’s case study is the appropriation of Indian music and spiritualism by US/UK, 1960s to present.
Required Readings: Reck, David. 2008. ‘The Beatles and Indian Music’, in Sgt Pepper and the Beatles: it was forty years ago today, edited by Olivier Julien, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 63-74.
Williams, Ruth. 2011. ‘Eat, Pray, Love: Producing the Female Neoliberal Spiritual Subject’, The Journal of Popular Culture, pp 1-21.
Further reading: Jameson, F., 1983, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in Foster, H (ed) 1983, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture. Bay Press: Washington. pp. 111-125.
Week by Week lecture topics and readings 12
Key terms: public sphere, World Englishes, global knowledge economy. This week we reflect on the University as a kind of Global Culture, with notice university exchange to and from partner universities in Asia.
Required Reading: Appadurai, Arjun. "Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination." Public Culture 12.1 (2000): 1-21.
Q and A for reflective essay.
Assessment at a glance
Assessment Task | Word Count | Value | Due Date |
Quizzes | n/a | 20% | Ongoing: Fridays of weeks 3, 6, 9, and 12 |
Discussion Board | 1000 words (five 200 word posts) | 20% | Bi weekly posts made between w. 2 and 11 due midnight before your tutorial |
Group Project |
As per instructions | 30% | in week 12 tutorials |
Short Essay | 1500 words | 30% | 7 June (examination period) |
Assessment breakdown: Online Quizzes
Purpose:
The tests will examine students’ knowledge of the reading and lecture material (in the weeks since the previous test). The focus of each quiz will be the comprehension and knowledge of terms and concepts rather than analytical application. The quizzes work with the first two learning objectives of this unit: deeper knowledge about the concepts in the readings, and demonstrated acquired knowledge on this material. Your final mark in the quiz category will be the average of the top three attempts, so you can miss or bomb out on one quiz with no penalty.
Due: Quiz 1 = 17 March; Quiz 2 = 6 April (7/4 is Good Friday); Quiz 3 = 5 May; Quiz 4 = 26 May.Quizzes will be open on the day from 9 am to 11:55 pm Melbourne time.
Value: 20% (average of top 3 quizzes)
Word count: n/a
Instructions: click on each quiz link by midnight on the dates above. Before you start, make sure your internet is stable and I suggest working on a computer rather than a handheld device if possible. You have just one attempt.
Assessment breakdown: Reflection/Discussion Board
Purpose: The main point of the weekly exercise is to reflect on the material in the required readings (and the lecture). These short posts are required before scheduled tutorials because they form the basis for discussion the following week. Because of the online nature of this task, students are encouraged to use media-rich content and a more informal and creative writing style is accepted, but the writing should still be clear, informative and relevant to the week's topic.
Students with even numbered ID#s post in even weeks; students with odd numbered ID#s post in odd weeks.
Value: 20%
Word count: Each post should be no more than 200 words (the exercise should total no more than 1000 words).
Instructions: When writing your posts, markers are looking for the following points:
CONTENT: do the reading, using strategies such as highlighting, note taking, mind maps and so on.
INTEGRATION: go over your notes from the lecture and reflect on connections between information in the lectures and the content of the readings.
CITATION: as you write, make sure to make notes on where ideas came from -- use hyperlinks where you can to 'cite' online. If this isn't possible you can use an 'in text' method. Be sure to clearly delineate your ideas from others.
FOCUS: you may enhance the discussion by taking a relevant issue from current or recent events, or in your own experience but be careful to stay on topic! Don't ramble on, use your word count carefully.
PRESENTATION: the reflective post is presented well both in terms of grammar, punctuation, spelling and online publication norms (e.g. sizing, centering, no broken links, etc).
Late or missing posts are penalised as following:
Given the time sensitive and ongoing nature of this task (plus the brief nature of the post), 2-day extensions will be considered in only exceptional circumstances. Students in extraordinary circumstances (including those registered with DLU) are advised to apply for special consideration early to receive alternative assessment if their situation prevents them from participating in this online activity.
�In this assessment, you must not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to generate any materials or content in relation to the assessment task.
Assessment breakdown: Performance/ Group Project
Purpose: To present collaborative work on a more professionally oriented project related to a major theme of the unit to your peers.
Due: in week 12 of your tutorial -- Monday the 22nd of May. You are to upload any audiovisual or written material (or links to multimedia) through the portal by 11:55 PM Melbourne time on the day of your presentation.
The in-class presentation is a way to share ideas with your classmates and gain more insight into the workings of the team which will inform your reflective short essay (see below).
Your shared team project mark will draw on the submitted work.
Value: 30%
Word count: approximately 15 minute short presentation in tutorials in week 12; follow up by submitting a file (mp4, ppt or word doc accepted) so that the marker can double check information. Policy paper writers post their paper; those who did live presentations must submit their script and/or slides. TED Talk creators can send recording either in mp4 format or send a link to a google drive where the file is stored. The paper and script length should be approximately 1000 words.
Instructions: This task is part of tutorial/workshop activities and the majority of the work done will be undertaken during class time.
In week 5, students within tutorials will form small groups (3-4 people) and choose one of the three suggested projects.
You will work in the second hour of the tutorial workshop together in weeks 6-11 preparing your presentation and accompanying report. Specifics on each of the group project formats and themes can be found in the 'group project advice' document here; make sure you've read them carefully before week 5. It's also crucial to look at the marking matrix to see what we are looking for in the final submission.
�In this assessment, you must not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to generate any materials or content in relation to the assessment task.
Assessment breakdown: Reflective Essay
Assessment 4: Short [reflective] Essay
Purpose: This short essay gives students to reflect and write individually about the academic ideas that underpinned their group project. See instructions and sample grading matrix below for further details.
Due: 7 June 11:55 pm Melbourne Time
Value: 30%
Word count: 1500 words
Congratulations! You’ve just successfully presented your group project to your tutorial classmates! Now, show the teaching staff what your take-away message was from the experience.
The questions to answer are two-fold:
Secondary questions / topics that should be addressed in your essay:
�In this assessment, you must not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to generate any materials or content in relation to the assessment task.