East Asian Pop Culture and the Trajectory of Asian Consumption

This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption Wee, C. J. Wan‑Ling 2016 Wee, C. J. W.‑L. (2016). East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption. Inter‑Asia Cultural Studies, 17(2), 305‑315. doi:10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/144562 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor and Francis in Inter‑Asia Cultural Studies on 21 June 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649373.2016.1184428 Downloaded on 04 Oct 2021 21:01:53 SGT Accepted and finalised version of: Wee, C. J. W.-L. (2016). ‘East Asian Pop Culture and the Trajectory of Asian Consumption’. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 17(2), 303-315. C. J. W.-L. WEE Notes on contributor: C. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has held Visiting Fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India, and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, among other institutions. Wee is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007), and a board member of the journal Modern Asian Studies. Contact: [email protected] Keywords: Cultural studies; East Asia; Pop Culture; consumption/consumerism. Abstract: This article focusses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. He cautions, though, that the national-popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the ‘Asia’ imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as in institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region. East Asian Pop Culture and the Trajectory of Asian Consumption Professor Chua Beng Huat’s work on East Asian pop culture is significant in the manner by which the development of a multilingual and multi-format pop culture can be indexed against the emergence of the 1980s “East Asian Miracle” economies that, perhaps unsurprisingly, deepened a regional desire for modern cultural formations that could accompany this expansive economic buoyancy. His earlier work on consumption and its link with urban culture goes back to at least 1990, with his essay “Steps to Become a Fashion 1 Consumer in Singapore”. Many of the essays or articles related to Singapore have been collected in Life is Not Complete without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore.1 Beng Huat’s fundamental stance is that consumption inevitably increases with an emerging middle class, and during the Miracle years, “sustained economic growth had translated into a rapid expansion of consumerism as part of daily life”, so that [i]ndeed by the time of 1997 economic crisis in Asia, the broad-based expansion of consumption had already been established in most of the affected locations in industrialised East and Southeast Asia[,…] spawned not only by rapid economic growth in contemporary Asia but also by the global expansion of consumerism.2 That is to say, increased consumerism relates to both national and regional economic growth and in relation to the expansion of consumerism worldwide – the different levels interact and it is not one level that is paramount. The clear implication is also that the 1997 crisis will not in itself dampen the ongoing “expansion of consumerism”. The following assessment by one of the few American cultural critics to even notice “resurgent” Asia in the 1990s, Fredric Jameson, of (the weakness of) Japanese cultural power at the height of their bubble economy underlines a central issue on cultural productivity and the sustaining of everyday economic development that Beng Huat’s work unintentionally but in effect questions: [I]t does seem to me that fresh cultural production and innovation – and this means in the area of mass-consumed culture – are the crucial index of the centrality of a given area and not its wealth or productive power. [... Despite] Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures [in 1989] and Matsushita’s buyout of MCA [in 1990], ... the Japanese were unable to master the essentially cultural productivity required to secure the globalization process for any given competitor. Whoever says the production of cultures says the production of everyday life – and without that, your economic system can scarcely continue to expand and implant itself.3 Jameson, unsurprisingly, was unaware of the wave of Japanese pop culture in East and Southeast Asia occurring at the precise point of the publication of his chapter in 1998. The important implication of Beng Huat’s work is that the “cultural productivity” that could support and “secure” the region’s interconnected economic system need not be national, but could come about from a number of different national locations – Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Korea – and jointly 2 reproduce the cross-border “production of [a] daily life” that reinforces the region’s ongoing capitalist production, even if the challenge of regional nationalism continues to exist.4 Equally important in relation to Beng Huat’s achievement in this inter-Asian arena of both social and cultural study was the related institution building undertaken at the Cultural Studies Cluster that he started in 2005 at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) of the National University of Singapore (NUS); as he puts it himself in the Interview that appears in this volume, “The Cultural Studies cluster was instituted because it was an emergent field in Asia and yet to exist in NUS.” His leadership in the Cluster created a distinctive space where interdisciplinary work on pop culture of not only East Asia, but also of Singapore, Southeast Asia and South Asia across a variety of media was enabled, and a productive network of scholars fostered. Beyond Binary Oppositions in Pop-Cultural Formations What is the image of “East Asia” that surfaces through the burgeoning pop culture that we see since the 1980s? And does it exceed clichéd binary notions of the local and localities in opposition to the universal and hegemonic modern West? There are a number of positions that Beng Huat takes that mark his writing from his studies on Singapore to his later examination of East Asian pop culture. One key position follows from how consumerism and consumerist culture from “elsewhere” interact with local desires for consumption, given economic development: he was and remains against a notion of blunt Americanisation or cultural imperialism, if that meant that the “invasion” of Western goods and culture under the condition of rising prosperity would threaten the cultural identity of Singapore youths. This stand similarly applies to various forms of Chinese-language pop music that circulated in the city-state in the 1980s and 1990s: Indeed, a major teenage phenomenon in Singapore is the “fandom” of Mandarin and Cantonese pop-singers from Taiwan and Hong Kong. The reference point for Singapore’s youths is, therefore, a global mix of images of “youth”, instead of 3 confusion. However, consumption of global images unavoidably passes through local cultural and political conditions.5 The local does comingle with the difference from various “other” cultures West and East – viz. the “global mix” of Euro-American and Hong Kong- and Taiwan-related pop cultures; but this comingling and therefore erasure of binary positions does not confuse and does not eradicate but instead passes through the lens and practices of the local – even when what arrives are supposed notions of Chineseness that from some perspectives ought to directly relate to a city-state that is 75 per cent ethnic Chinese. If any binary discourse of “‘Asian’ versus ‘Western’ values”6 is to be rejected, so are discourses on the Asian or even the Chinese. “Us” impinging upon “them” is too simplistic an analytical take in the study of inter-Asian cultural production. Chua Beng Huat also tends not to be overly concerned with the theoretical and analytical considerations of what he calls “postmodern writers”, here referring to some versions of cultural studies criticism done on both sides of the Atlantic,7 which treat style as the resistant expression of subjective individual or collective identities. Instead, his focus is on “the political and economic conditions that underpin consumption as a social cultural phenomenon, at a time when these conditions have been often neglected by many analyses which are focused on consumption purely as a form of identity politics”.8 It is not that he rejects identity politics as a pertinent issue

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