The culture industry

Live Streaming and Digital Stages for the Hungry Ghosts and Deities

This paper examines the success of Full House Thai, a Thai remake of popular Korean drama “Full House”. First, it explores the indigenization of Korean elements in the Thai remake Full House, arguing that the success of Full House Thai lies not only on the attractiveness of Thai actor and actress but also on the Thai-ization of Korean elements. The second part looks at the reception of Asian audience towards Full House Thai. Taking the case of Vietnamese audience, the paper explores how Vietnamese audience interpret Thai remake version in relation to the original Korean version as well as with respect to Thai culture portrayed in the series. The aspects of Thai culture the paper asks Vietnamese audience to reflect upon include views on gender, roles of men and women, the portrayal of social class as well as romantic love. Data presented in this paper come from textual analysis as well as in-depth interviews with 15 Vietnamese audiences.

Thai Television Dramas, a New Player in Asian Media Circulation: A Case Study of Full House Thai

We provide a bifocal account on teaching techniques and learning achievements in suggesting that Malay poems, as a resource, are beneficial to foreign language pedagogy. The teaching focus was the Malay poetic-discursive strategies at the stylistic levels. By examining the structures of three poems, the pedagogy positions Malay poems as communicative assembles of Malay linguistic categories for conveying a series of messages. A learning focus is in place toward the production of a poem in the weblogs for developing the confidence to communicate in Malay. The learning results in three submissions from four tertiary learners who produce reflective poetic expressions with visual stimulations. Their creative outputs indicate that poetry offers a cathartic avenue for developing interpersonal intelligence. Writing about sibling relationship, inter-generation gap and conviction for success, the poem project perpetuates intrinsic values thus complementing the pragmatic reasons typically associated with foreign language education. In this respect, language pedagogy using Malay poems is a value-adding practice relevant in foreign language education.

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Learning Malay with Poems: From Understanding Stylistics to Blogging Poetic Expressions

In examining Hokkien as a heritage language in Singapore, this discussion hopes to contribute to an enriching of the perception of citizenship in an ever-evolving national narrative towards one people (Mathew, 2017). The Singapore Census of Population statistics indicate that 11% of ethnic local Chinese households speak Hokkien. Singaporean television serials and movies that use Hokkien as the medium of narration achieve encouraging viewership and box office ratings, hinting that Hokkien is understood, or appreciated by a significant number of the local population as a language of prominence. Therefore, since Hokkien holds a key to common Chinese Singaporean cultural memories, this paper contemplates if learning Hokkien could cultivate a collective resilience when balancing professional, and personal challenges. To this end, 冰冰Show, a contemporary Taiwanese variety program available on YouTube, is used to evaluate the potential power of this language in nurturing citizenship.

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Hokkien as a Heritage Language of Citizenry in Singapore

As part of its modernization project, the postcolonial Singapore state has systematically marginalized the vernacular cultures of the country’s colonial-era immigrant society. Nevertheless, Hokkien popular music has persisted not only in the street festivals that were so characteristic of the colonial port city but also in local movies. A combination of official discouragement and changes in education levels and demography has diminished the significance of Hokkien music in the country. Instead of the mark of evolving, living culture, Hokkien music resembles more of a vestigial articulation of working class tribulations and of middle class nostalgia and reaction to the vicissitudes of capitalist modernity in Singapore. Critical scrutiny of the unchanging replay of traditionalized narratives in texts and live street performances of getai , as well as of theme songs from Singaporean films and Taiwanese soap operas, demonstrates the process through which pop music becomes vestigial.

Vestigial pop : Hokkien popular music and the cultural fossilization of subalternity in Singapore

Upon first browsing of Pop Culture Formations across East Asia, one is puzzled that this book about popular culture in East Asia does not have a single chapter on popular culture from China, and only has a few pages discussing the culture industries of Japan. It is perhaps more appropriate to title the book as Pop Culture Formations across Asia instead, as there are three chapters in the volume dealing with issues in the national cinemas of Indonesia and Malaysia, which are countries in Southeast Asia rather than East Asia. However, considering that this book is a collection of papers coming out of the 2009 Korea-ASEAN Academic Conference on Popular Culture across East Asia in the 21st Century: Hybridization or Asianization? (held at Burapha University, Thailand), it is little surprise that the book has somewhat disproportionate coverage of the Korean Wave and its influence on countries in Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, this volume provides valuable insights into recent trends and developments in intra-Asian flows of popular culture and raises important questions about the emergence of cultural hierarchies in the “Asianization of cultural production, distribution and consumption” (p. 9). Edited by Doobo Shim, Ariel Heryanto, and Ubonrat Siriyuvasak, the book is divided into three sections. The first section, Media Consumption in Asia and Identity Politics, opens with a chapter by Young-Hee Chung on the pleasures that audiences derive from watching My Name is Kim Sam Soon, a Korean television drama

Brenda Chan

Papers

Vestigial pop : Hokkien popular music and the cultural fossilization of subalternity in Singapore

Pop Culture Formations across East Asia (review)