Organizer and Chair: R. Anderson Sutton, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Amalia Ahmad, ANteve, Jakarta
Television is arguably the preeminent medium of cultural transfer and translation in Asia, as it is around the globe. What implications does this global fact have for identity formation in Asia and for Asians in diaspora? Public discourse often attributes to television a formidable power in shaping cultural identity, articulated in cultural doomsday scenarios of homogenization and loss of local values and "essence." This session brings together scholars who offer alternative perspectives, addressing the roles of television in creating and transforming identity, focusing on aspects of language, image, and musical style.
The session is designed to promote interaction and to explore beyond normal disciplinary and area boundaries. It involves four presenters from diverse disciplines and areas of expertise, each of whom will offer a 15-minute distillation of a longer paper, which is to be distributed to the other participants prior to the conference: Gareth Barkin, anthropologist, on presentation of imported shows in Indonesia; Shanti Kumar, communication arts, on vernacular television in South India; Lawrence Witzleben, ethnomusicologist, on language choice in televised music in Hong Kong; and Hemant Shah, mass communication, on Asian representations on American television.
The second hour will begin with commentary by Amalia Ahmad, a professional at Indonesia’s ANteve private television station, and an expert on production and programming. Subsequent discussion will pursue three issues explored in the presentations: (1) the deterritorialization of culture (beyond the well-worn "local-global" dichotomy); (2) cultural translation; (3) institutional and popular discourses about media.
Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing: The Boundary Between Censorship and Translation of Foreign Programs in Indonesia
Gareth Barkin, Washington University, St. LouisForeign programs account for a significant number of television hours watched in Indonesia, and the majority of these are re-edited and subtitled in the national language, Bahasa Indonesia. It is the thesis of this paper that these translation processes—in danger of being overlooked as neutral or irrelevant—actually play a significant role in shaping Indonesian understandings of Western attitudes, tastes and behaviors. It is further argued that these interpretations are particularly important to the emerging middle-class, whose perceptions of these attitudes may play a significant role in their own class-culture development. Subtitling and editing of both television and film is performed by Indonesian production and distribution companies which use a variety of discursive and ideational standards-both formal and informal—to ‘re-write’ scripts in a fashion which they deem acceptable and interesting to domestic audiences. These standards—which cover a range of themes from religion, sex and politics to narrative structure itself—provide a window of insight into the aggregation by elites of "Indonesian" values and interests for an imagined national culture. The intentional re-shaping of Western narratives is compounded by issues of cultural translation—the extent to which linguistic differences and culturally grounded readings of media texts necessarily result in their semiotic re-conception based on local frames of reference. This paper explores the nature and power of mass-media translation processes in Indonesia, the extent to which they represent resistance to Western cultural hegemony, and the alternative perspective, that they are best seen as ideological manipulation and covert censorship by elite interests.
This Land, This Day: The Place of Vernacular Media in the Age of Globalization
Shanti Kumar, University of Wisconsin, MadisonMany discussions on the globalization of media tend to focus on the rise of transnational media networks like Star TV, and the response of national media to these transformations at the global level. However, few scholars have focussed on the critical role of vernacular media at the regional and local levels in the debates over globalization and nationalism. In this paper, I seek to analyze the discourse of regional, vernacular media in India which have steadily grown in the last few years by strategically exploiting the competition between global and national networks. Using the case of a Telugu language network, Eenadu Television, which is part of a large, regional conglomerate in the city of Hyderabad in South India, I will critically examine how vernacular media cater to the regional interests and local tastes of their audiences in the age of globalization. I argue that Eenadu—a polysemic Telugu term which means "this day" and "this land"—represents not merely the name of a major regional conglomerate in Hyderabad, but it also articulates the creative ways in which vernacular media play on the linguistic appeal of cultural proximity and regional identity to compete with their national and global counterparts. By examining the hybrid production techniques and programming strategies of Eenadu Television, I contend that vernacular media represent a significant cultural space for audiences in India which the centralized national network did not ever deal with adequately, and the decentered global networks could not ever address appropriately.
Popular Music on Television in Hong Kong: One Country, Many Languages
J. Lawrence Witzleben, Chinese University of Hong KongThe vast majority of Hong Kong’s six million residents speak Cantonese as their primary language, and the local popular music market is dominated by Cantonese-language recordings and concerts. Awards shows and charity concert extravaganzas have long been a regular occurrence on the two Cantonese-language television networks, and the airwaves have served as a medium for exporting Hong Kong popular culture to Cantonese-speaking counterparts across the border in China.
With the development of Star TV’s satellite network in the late 1980s, Channel V arrived, and Hong Kong viewers could see their favorite local singers—along with those from Taiwan and the mainland—24 hours a day. More recently, MTV Asia became available to cable subscribers in many parts of Hong Kong. However, because of the local networks’ exclusive rights to Cantonese-language broadcasting, as well as the larger pan-Chinese market the satellite and cable networks are intended to reach, we have the paradox of Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong audiences watching Cantonese singers performing entirely in Mandarin, presented by VJs speaking Mandarin or English.
This paper compares the presentation of Chinese popular music on the Hong Kong networks and Channel V, with a particular emphasis on language and how it helps to define and delineate local, regional, and national audiences and identities.
"Asian Culture" and Asian American Identity on American Television
Hemant Shah, University of Wisconsin, MadisonAs Asian laborers migrated to the United States in the late 19th century, they were viewed as a peril to American values and culture. Needed but undesirable, Asians were the constant victims of racist attacks, draconian laws, and economic exploitation. The essentializing imagery that helped justify this domination abounded in literature, press reports, and films of the day. Today, while the overt need to dominate Asians may have passed, essentializing images of Asian Americans and ‘Asian culture’ persist in today’s popular mass media such as television.
Usually portrayed in mocking and stereotypical ways, Asians have been and continue to be represented in one of two ways. First, they are shown to gain power but not full acceptance in the white world by mastery of the mysterious "Eastern" knowledge of medicine, drugs, inner strength, and powers of deduction. Second, they are shown to gain acceptance into the white world (but no power) by being passive, dependent, or "Americanized." For women, acceptance comes from being docile and submissive, sexy and erotic. For men, acceptance comes from being calm and non-confrontational. Regardless of the specific depiction, images of Asian Americans on U.S. television serve to naturalize uniquely American ideologies of racial hierarchy and cultural exoticism.
This paper presents a critical reading of the ways Asian American identity and ‘culture(s)’ are constructed by prime-time television in the United States. Examples will be drawn from "All-American Girl," which depicts a semi-assimilated Korean-American family, and "Martial Law," whose Hong Kong detective is temporarily teamed with an African American officer.