Organizer: Bhaskar Sarkar, University of Southern California
Chair: Wimal Dissanayake, East-West Center
The recent move toward transnational configurations, reflected in rhetoric of a "borderless world," is dramatically exemplified in the emergence of pan-Asian sentiments. In recent decades, eastern and southeastern regions of Asia have experienced the fastest economic growth rates in the world, leading to a new-found sense of pride. The increased cooperation among the nations of this region has fostered a common ground of identity, a certain Asian-ness. This process of the "Asianization of Asia" has engendered various cultural responses. This panel interrogates some aspects of the cultural negotiations of Asian transnationalism, as seen in cinema and on television.
We address two broad aspects of the cultural negotiations. First, there are attempts to forge a transnational Asian identity. But the very concept of Asia is in flux, as competing configurations such as the Asia-Pacific vie with it. Australia wants to be considered a part of Asia, while India is eager to be a part of the Asia-Pacific. In this situation, what does it mean to be an Asian? At stake is the cognitive mapping of a reality undergoing rapid and constant transformation. Given the upheavals and displacements, how do Asians locate themselves culturally? Second, there is the reaction to increased homogenization: the renewed crystallization of essential identities, the reassertion of (eradicated) national/regional, ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious differences. Much of this reaction has to do with the suspicion that new forms of hegemony are being established in the guise of transnationalism.
The panel collectively proposes that the rapid changes in Asia-heralded as the beginnings of a transnational utopia-are not costless. The gains, while tremendous, do not accrue across the board; the masses face untold hardships, and disruption of their customary ways of life. Audiovisual mediations of the emerging Asian-ness are not always unequivocally celebratory. Perhaps the most positive representations are to be found in commercial television programming, and popular music videos. Such cultural production has to be situated in the context of the interpenetration of global capitalism and Asia, and the subjectivities necessitated by such developments. Then there are the popular film genres of southeast Asia, which interrogate contemporary social formations and/or provide a way of playing out popular anxieties, alleviating them somewhat in the process. Finally, certain films resuscitate trenchantly local bases of identity, offering them in opposition to the homogenization, dissociation and alienation that transnationalism is alleged to perpetrate.
A New Star in the Global Village? TV and the Pan-Asian Mobilization
Chia-chi Wu, University of Southern California
Since the last decade, as a result of its post-World War II economic ascendancy, the "Asia-Pacific" or "Pacific-Rim" area, regardless of whether or not they respond to a fixed geographic reference, has been constantly (re-)constructed as the most recent and fecund frontier for the new phase in the history of capitalism-global capitalism. In addition to the fervidly utopian futurologies characterized by western prophets such as John Naisbitt, S. B. Linder (The Pacific Century: Economic and Political Consequences of Asian-Pacific Dynamism, 1986), and Alvin Toffler (Third Wave, 1980), Asia seems to be configuring itself in the same myth and trope of "frontier" as well, with the formation of NEI, ASEAN and APEC, etc. The paper will explore how television, as a transnational electronic medium, inscribes Asia or the Asia-Pacific into the logic of late capitalism with its "self-Asianization."
I will focus on two things, one on this side of the Pacific-TV commercials aired by long distance phone companies such MCI and AT&T, which are aimed at the Asian population in California. The other side of the Pacific-the Hong Kong-based TV network STAR (Satellite TV in the Asian Region), the first commercial pan-Asia television network, which reaches out to at least half of the world's population, capturing a potential audience of three billion.
A network of issues will be addressed: (1) the origins of the idea of Asia-Pacific community and its contradictions. Do the titles such as "Four Dragons" or "Five Tigers" imply a self-Orientalizing stance or assume an anti-hegemonic significance? Or both? And, if it assumes an anti-hegemonic relevance, does it signify the reversal of hegemony, of the old model of First-Third World based on the West-East divide? (2) how do Star's programming and other discourses-trade journals, media magazines-utopianize Asia as the literal new star in the media market, which is euphemized as transcending not only geographic boundaries but borders of political ideologies (communism, authoritarianism, Third World . . .) as well as culture and religion? Yet is it a celebration of transnationalism/multiculturalism or the triumph of global capitalism? In other words, does Star pose as a prominent example of incorporating and absorbing capitalism into the region, or the other way around, the re-inscription of Asia into the totalizing ideology-less ideology of capitalism? (3) how do these TV commercials and Star's programming interface nationalism and globalism? What are the implications of this phenomenon for the status of nation-state today? Is nationalism dead in the wake of internationalization as well as cultural homogenization (especially in terms of youth music culture) in the Asian region? Or as a century-old myth, nationalism persists and is constantly appropriated by transnational corporations for maximum profits? Or, as David Morley argues, new technology should be seen as domesticated by old cultural constructs, therefore reinforcing the old sense of communities rather than dissipating them.
In investigating the questions above, the paper seeks to highlight the contraditions and problematics of the Asian myth, in the hope that such case study will shed light on certain issues of post-colonial studies as well as cultural studies.
Hong Kong Hysteria: Tales from a Transnational Asian Front
Bhaskar Sarkar, University of Southern California
In this paper, I interrogate the issue of an emergent pan-Asian sentiment in the wake of rapid transformations in the continent. I look at certain films coming out of Hong Kong that seem to participate in the fostering of a transnational Asian identity.
Recent developments have led to rhetoric of a "global village," and "borderless world": there is a distinct shift toward transnational configurations. The Asia-Pacific region is perhaps the most prominent and contentious example of these novel geopolitical imaginings. While the Asia-Pacific includes the Pacific rim of the Americas and Australia, it is the Asian economic miracle of the last two decades that has fueled this new configuration. The recent economic boom in that continent has raised the possibility of a resurgent Asia leading the world into the next century (or even the next millenium, depending upon the level of romanticization). Indeed, Asian-ness has become the source of a new sense of pride: commentators have identified the process of the "Asianization of Asia."
Yet, the notion of Asia as a single geopolitical entity is inherently problematic. It elides over the various tensions that come in the way of such pan-Asian mobilizations. Are we witnessing a genuinely pan-Asian movement, or is it the establishment of an exclusive club, with large membership dues? Who gains, and who loses out in the process?
The very concept of Asia comes from the Greeks. But how do Asians map their reality in the contemporary world? What new cognitive production of Asia is seen in the popular media? I focus on the popular Swordsman films from Hong Kong, particularly on the figure of Asia the Invincible-a warrior who castrates himself to gain supernatural fighting powers. I argue that in the absence of a clear cognitive grasp of the vast transformations in their lives, Asians are looking toward mythic structures. The realm of martial arts provides such a space, where the sheer performativity of the genre allows for a parody of the emergent structures, even as they remain largely opaque. The rapid changes are leaving the vast majority out in the cold, with the fruits of economic growth accruing to a small transnational elite. In this new regime of displacement and exploitation, the anxieties are being played out-and partly alleviated-at a mythic register.
The fate of Hong Kong after 1997 is surely a significant issue; the repeated theme of castration/amputation in recent martial arts films can be linked to apprehensions about the long separation, the imminent restoration, and the impending adjustments. But it would be reductive to dwell on only that one historic moment. This paper attempts to elaborate on the multiple anxieties that are played out in these hysterical texts. For instance, the castration of the main character is tied to the feminization of Asia in the colonial era; it can also be seen as the final capitulation of Asian countries to the teleological march of Western capitalism. Moments of resistance and "Asianization," such as Singapore's insistence on Confucian capitalism, are also addressed.
The Fatherland, Nationalist Films, and Modernity in the Asia Pacific
Roland B. Tolentino, University of the Philippines
The Asia Pacific's economic rise as the world's prime growth area alludes to the increased interest in the region's evolving cultural discourse. As the various nations experience economic prosperity, so does the proliferation of the boom's contending cultural forms persist. Nationalist films provide a retrospective imaging of the nation's struggles for the oblique ideals of greater democracy and economic liberalism. Produced rampantly at the historic moment of the nation's economic take-off and rise, these films attempt to provide an introspection of the nation's past and present. Since the nationalism of the nation's past is depicted as traumatic, the ensuing economic prosperity is represented as expressive of both alienation and fragmentation.
The male character is the privileged trope that inscribes the nation's reworking of both past nationalism and present economic prosperity. The paper examines the cultural politics of the fatherland in the nationalist films: what is the global context in which the male figure becomes emblematic of the region's drive for economic and democratic liberalism? How is this expression of the regional drive culturally and historically specific among the various nations? How is the male narrative of nationhood privileged in the region's writing of modernity and development? What is the price nations are willing to pay to locate the experience of modernity? And lastly, how is the fatherland differentially sexualized from the motherland?
I examine three nationalist films-all produced in 1995-in which the male figure provides a mediation between the nation's past nationalist struggle, the central focus of these films, and the present economic prosperity, mostly absent but nonetheless implied in these films. A Single Spark (Park Kwang-Su) depicts the 1970s South Korean labor struggle as marginal yet integral to the economic and democratic predicaments of the 1990s. Frustrated by the media's lack of concern to publicize the sweatshop workers' condition, the young Jeon Tae-Il, a historical figure, decides self-immolation. Eskapo (Chito Rono) recounts the "true-to-life" escape of two middle-aged Filipinos from the political and economic repression of the Marcos dictatorship. Though coming from two of the richest families in the Philippines, Eugenio Lopez and Sergio Osmena, Jr. are nonetheless imprisoned and tormented. Their passage to the United States provides a relief in this political saga. Super Citizen Ko (Wan Jen) narrates the story of a Taiwanese intellectual imprisoned in the Kuomintang's "White Terror" campaigns of the 1950s. When he decides to clarify the past, the aging Ko I-Sheng is lost in the search as Taiwan's political and economic landscapes have rapidly shifted.
The Million-Man Continuum: The Emergent Global-Local Hero on the Bollywood Screen
Bishnupriya Ghosh, Utah State University
Focusing on masculinity as a privileged trope in redefinition of cultural identity, I look at the emergence of a new kind of hero on the Indian Bollywood (Bombay commercial film industry) screen. I argue that in the 1980s and 1990s, increased economic liberalization and post-Emergency disillusion about "nation," its civic and political possibilities has led to a discernible change in India's perceptions of nationhood. Nowhere is this change more evident than on the dreamscreen where one can clearly identify a corresponding change in the hero-image.
"Nation," as several theorists have outlined, must always be thought of relationally: as a construct written in-between global and regional identities and cultural practices (Anderson, 1983; Kinder, 1993). Changes in transnational practices, migrations, economic configurations must then entail structural alterations in the nation-state and changes in the nation as an imagined community. The recent escalating upheavals in economic, political and cultural realms in the Asian-Pacific have affected India; in terms of identity, there is a dissolution of a sense of an "Indian-ness" (promulgated by Nehru in the early years of independence). Conceptions of the masculine recording the nation's pulse on screen image such dissolution as well as the reaction to this disintegration evidenced in re-entrenched ethnical/local/religious identities.
Sumita Chakravorty's (1993) recent work on national identity in Indian cinema briefly examines the masculine codes that create the all-Indian hero in commercial Indian cinema: the hero often masquerades as a specific ethnic or religious prototype, but the point of the disguise is precisely its unmasking-when the hero is finally revealed to be essentially "Indian" underneath such cultural specificity. Indian-ness in dress, mannerisms, language/accent and so forth is replaced in the 1980s and 1990s by a global action hero in torn jeans, sculpted as Stallone and familiar with martial arts, machine guns, bombs and Western-style hip-hop dancing. This global conglomerate commodity spells the dissolution of Indian-ness as a specific national construct, in an age where the country hurtles toward more multinational investment, increased migratory practices (the "traveling nation" characterized in a recent issue of Socialist Review on the South Asian diaspora), and homogenized cultural practices/products.
In sharp reaction to such global homogenization there is a simultaneous reassertion of ethnic, religious and other cultural specificities in the same new hero. No longer are culturally specific markers donned to be shed: Hindu saffron and sword indicates an essential Hindu-ness, Kashmiri costumes mark loyalty and fierce identification with one region. The new Hollywood heroes are physically well-trained men with a decided commitment to a particular community who often lead what looks like a revolution-a million man (and usually this is imaged as a question of male civic responsibility) march against a corrupt government, police force, press and the silent acquiescent middle class. I will examine three films that configure this new global-local hero, while referring to several others: Prahaar (1992), Narsimha (1993) and Kshatriya (1990).