We investigate how brand managers create regional Asian brands and show how some of them are attempting to forge new webs of interconnectedness through the construction of a transnational, imagined Asian world. Some branding managers are creating regional brands that emphasize the common experience of globalization, evoke a generic, hyper-urban, and multicultural experience, and are infused with diverse cultural referents. These types of regional Asian brands contribute to the creation of an imagined Asia as urban, modern, and multicultural. Understanding this process helps one to appreciate the role of branding managers in constructing markets and places.

http://www.juliencayla.com/JCR%20final.pdf

Asian Brands and the Shaping of a Transnational Imagined Community

Movies, stars, auteurs, critics, and the sheer excitement of cinema come together in film festivals as quintessential constellations of art, business, and glamour. Yet, how well do we actually understand the forces and meanings that these events embody?"Film Festivals" offers the first comprehensive overview of the history, people, films, and multiple functions of the festival world. From Sundance to Hong Kong, from the glitter of Cannes to edgier festivals that challenge boundaries or foster LGBTQ cultural production, film festivals celebrate art, promote business, bring cinema to diverse audiences, and raise key issues about how we see our world. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong situates festivals within changing global practices of film, including their important ties to both Hollywood and independent cinema. She explores how these events have become central in the construction of cinema knowledge as well as the behind-the-scene mechanics of finance, distribution, and evaluation. By linking general structures and connections to specific films and auteurs, Wong addresses the components and creation of film festivals that continue to reshape filmmaking as art and business.

Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen

Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas

This thesis focuses on the rise in graphic TV horror in the twenty-first century. Locating it within wider cultural contexts, shifting TV industries and digital technologies, and online transcultural audiences, I analyse this mode of genre television hitherto unseen on this domestic media platform. The thesis draws upon and revises Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory (1982) as a means of constructing an analytical framework that allows me to explore the cultural and subtextual meaning of TV horror, evidencing how graphic horror is implemented as a discursive marker of quality TV aesthetics within specific production and (trans)national contexts. These are British public service television, US basic cable, and US/Japanese premium cable co-productions, providing both domestic and transcultural foci. I also explore how the formatting and media ecologies of TV horror can shape meaning (Lobato and Thomas 2015), and how screen abjection is affectively engaged with in an on-going and gradational manner via what I am conceptualising as ‘abject spectrums’. This involves considering how the phenomenological, psychological, and cultural components of abjection can intersect, serving to better account for audience-horror text relationships at pre-textual, paratextual and extra-textual levels, as well as in relation to diegetic, transmedial, and post-object audience readings. In order to do this, I employ textual analysis and netnography to provide in-depth examination of my case studies: BBC3’s youth TV horror In the Flesh, AMC’s basic cable transmedia franchise The Walking Dead, and Showtime’s premium cable Masters Of Horror, specifically its American/Japanese co-produced episodes ‘Imprint’ and ‘Dream Cruise’, analysing the online fans and anti-fans who responded to these texts. In my effort to offer much needed attention to this form of television, I build on the work of Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott (2013) and offer two interlinking sections that critically unpack graphic twenty-first century TV horror. Beginning from a textualist point of view in Part I, each Chapter analyses a specific case study’s abject attributes as diegetic horror, and considers how abjection is used within bids for an elevated cultural status in TV industry contexts. In Part II, all three case studies are analysed together, with each Chapter structured thematically to develop my abject spectrum model – a gradational conceptualisation that situates abjection between aesthetic, affective, and/or ideological reactions/readings. This begins by considering how Web 2.0 has shaped the formatting, circulation, and consumption of twenty-first century TV horror, particularly on an international scale. I therefore offer ‘Only-Click TV’ (see also Gillan 2011) as a model that addresses the situation when textual content is solely available online for certain audiences,and how this can shape meaning and value for these viewers. I then turn to how audiences’ responded to the on-screen abjection of the case studies. Using my abject spectrum model I account for polysemic readings, how self-identity can anchor readings, and how the cultural construction of abjection is negotiated via ‘third space’ transcultural translations (Bhabha 1994). Finally, building on the traditional analysis of audiences’ written logos (Postill 2010:648, Gillan 2016:21), I extend my analysis to online image culture as a salient user practice and a valuable data type in evidencing abject spectrums. Such work complements the mixed method approaches of TV Studies (Geraghty and Lusted 1998, Geraghty 2003, Creeber 2006a, Casey et al 2008) better serves the understanding of audiences in Horror Studies (Cheery 20020, Hills 2005a, 2014a, Hanich 2010, Barker et al 2016) and triangulates these approaches with the focus on active participation that has been characteristic of Fan Studies (Hills 2002a, Jenkins 2010a, Booth 2015b, Gillan 2016). The thesis concludes by highlighting how graphic and ‘cinematic’ TV horror has become far more common. Thus, the Conclusion discusses potential future research into other forms of TV horror present in the twenty-first century that experiment with more ‘ordinary’ forms of television, such as reality TV, and how ‘post-TV’ that disrupts TV’s ontology also opens up new areas of research in terms of content and audience engagement. Furthermore, in noting the limitations of netnography to develop and demonstrate abject spectrums, I suggest interviewing as a research method that could better serve the phenomenological aspects of the model involving individuals’ histories and experiences of texts. Resultantly, the thesis’ main original contribution is the abject spectrum; this is an on-going and gradational concept that can account for the range of ways audiences encounter a text; the myriad readings and responses to TV horror texts that involve a much more expansive affective field than simply being scared; and the longitudinal perspective where new experiences and repeat consumption can shift and change audience-text relationships.

Exploring abjection in twenty-first century ‘quality’ TV horror and the abject spectrums of its online fan audiences

In the mid 1990s ‘transnational’ meant a pan-Chinese universalism trying to reconcile the differences and conflicts among the mainland, colonial Hong Kong, KMT Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora. But since the rise of the new China market and the centralization of Chinese blockbusters, the transnational currency may have been replaced by an intra-national, if not hyper-national tender. The essay addresses the tension and dialectics between marketization and protectionism of the national screen industry in China. A political-economic approach analyzes the rise of the China Film Group (CFG) and its attempt to re-nationalize and transnationalize Chinese cinema. Accounting for recent developments of pan-Asian strategy, and CEPA, this case study will explain tensions inherent in China's integration to global media. CFG presents marketization as liberalization but this is part of a scheme to utilize the market to consolidate state power.

Re-nationalizing China's film industry: case study on the China Film Group and film marketization

This book presents a comprehensive account of East Asian cinema, its successes and challenges. East Asian cinema is a growing industry, producing films popular all over the world. This book examines not only films, but the global forces affecting their production. It is a fascinating study for anyone interested in film or East Asian culture. "East Asian Screen Industries" is a guide to the film industries of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the PRC. The authors examine how local production has responded to global trends and explore the effects of widespread de-regulation and China's accession to the World Trade Organisation.

East Asian Screen Industries

Focusing on the work of four contemporary filmmakers-Ang Lee, Edward Yang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Tsai Ming-liang-the authors explore how these filmmakers broke from tradition, creating a cinema that is both personal and insistent on examining Taiwan's complex history. Featuring stills, anecdotes, and close readings of films, the authors consider the influence of Hong Kong and martial arts films, directors' experiments with autobiography, the shifting fortunes of the Taiwanese film industry, and Taiwan cinema in the context of international cinema's aesthetics and business practices.

Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island

Explores the role of 1930s Japanese cinema in the construction of a national identity and in the larger context of Japan's encounter-and struggle-with the West and modernity. Davis lends a new perspective to such celebrated films as Gate of Hell, Kagemusha, and Ran.

Darrell William Davis

Papers

Re-nationalizing China's film industry: case study on the China Film Group and film marketization

East Asian Screen Industries

Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island

Picturing Japaneseness: Monumental Style, National Identity, Japanese Film

Warning! Category III : the other Hong Kong cinema