Asian Cultural Flows

This book investigates economic, political, and cultural conditions that have led to transnational flows of culture in Asia. Coverage also looks at the consequences of an increasingly interconnected Asian regional culture as well as policy makers and cultural industries' response to it. The book features essays written by researchers from different countries in Asia and beyond with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. The volume also contains engaging examples and cases with comparative perspectives.

The contributors provide readers with grounded analysis in the organizational and economic logics of Asian creative industries, national cultural policies that promote or hinder cultural flows, and the media convergence and online consumers' surging demand for Asianized cultural products. Such insights are of crucial importance for a better understanding of the dynamics of transnational cultural flows in contemporary Asia. In addition, the essays aim to “de-westernize” the study of cultural and creative industries, which draws predominantly on cases in the United States and Europe. The contributors focus instead on regional dynamics of the development of these industries.

The popularity of J-Pop and K-Pop in East and Southeast Asia (and beyond) is now well known, but less is known about how this happened. This volume offers readers theoretical tools that will help them to make better sense of those exciting phenomena and other rising cultural flows within Asia and their relevance to the global cultural economy.

• Asia
• cultural industry
• cultural policy
• globalization
• popular culture

• Faculty of Economics, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

  Nobuko Kawashima

• Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London, London, UK

  Hye-Kyung Lee

Editors

Nobuko Kawashima is professor at the Faculty of Economics, Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan and also visiting professor at the Policy Alternatives Research Center, University of Tokyo, Japan.  She holds PhD in cultural policy (University of Warwick, UK) as well as MSc in social policy and LLM, both from the London School of Economics.  For publication in English, she has co-edited Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2017) and Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalizatoin (Routledge, 2002) and has published journal articles on cultural policy, cultural economics and the creative/cultural industries both on the UK and on Japan.  She has served the Japanese government’s committees and councils to advise on cultural policy development.  She is a former president of the Japan Association for Cultural Economics, and a member of the scientific committee of the International Conference on CulturalPolicy Research. 

Hye-Kyung Lee is a senior lecturer at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London. She has written on cultural policy and industries, cultural marketing, and transnational fan culture. She co-edited Cultural Policies in East Asia (2014, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-wrote a commissioned paper ‘The challenges and opportunities for the diversity of cultural expressions in the digital era in East Asia’ (2015, UNESCO Bangkok Office). Her monograph Cultural Policy in South Korea: Making a New Patron State (2018, Routledge), the first English-language book on this topic, provides a critical analysis of the historical trajectory and current practice of Korea’s cultural and arts policy. She is currently editing the Routledge Handbook of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Asia (2018) and writing research papers on the dynamic roles of the state in developing cultural industries and theinstitutional autonomy of culture.

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