International Program of Collaborative Research, CSEAS

Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia
Project Leader: NISSIM, Otmazgin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
（Term：2011）

• Outline of Joint Research
• Purpose of Joint Research
• Outline of Result

• Joint Seminars in 2011 Fiscal Year

Outline of Joint Research

This volume examines the recently emerging regional system for the production of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia and analyzes some of the latest endeavors for co-production and collaboration in the making and marketing of cultural commodities such as movies, music, comics, and animation. The essays focus on the cases of the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine and Indonesian culture industries to describe a major shift in East and Southeast Asia's popular culture markets toward a regional production system that is no longer based upon autonomous national economies. Rather, this system organizes and relocates production, distribution, and consumption of goods on a regional scale. Beyond the case studies examined, this project offers an opportunity to explore the production and exploitation of cultural imaginaries in the context of the intensive circulation of cultural commodities and images that represent a potential for a regional economy of trans-cultural production.

Purpose of Joint Research

Japanese fashion magazines in Chinese

Japanese manga in Vietnam

　The great majority of studies of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia have focused on cultural products as texts. These provide important information related to the practice and "meaning" of popular culture. However, for all the dramatic changes in East and Southeast Asia’s popular culture markets in recent decades, very little scholarly attention has been given to the organizational aspects of cultural diversity. There are very few studies which illuminate the production mechanisms, marketing, and collaboration routes of the cultural industries in East and Southeast Asia and their implication for the region.

　This volume thus provides an important corrective to the limitations of existing scholarship by providing empirically-based accounts of coproduction and collaboration in East and Southeast Asia’s popular culture and by introducing a regional framework to analyze the complex interrelationships between the cultural industries of this region.

　The volume offers a number of valuable advantages for readers. First, it represents the first major collection that describes and documents instances of co-production. As such, it offers a set of rich studies of patterns and processes in areas that have hitherto received almost no scholarly attention. Second, this volume represents a variety of specific cases through which co-production and collaboration takes place. It thus underscores both the diversity of patterns and of content areas through which these collaborative endeavors take place. Third, this collection presents the assortment of disciplines – political science, anthropology, economics, sociology, media and cultural studies – that have developed analytical tools for dealing with co-production. As such, it offers an explicit argument about the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the study of collaboration.

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