Popular Culture of East Asia

Description

This course provides an overview of the various forms of popular culture in East Asia and focuses on the question of how the rise of East Asian popular culture reflects the desire for "modernity" and "modernization" in each East Asian country and affects the interactions among them. Numerous popular cultural forms - music, film, TV drama, manga/anime, novels, entertainment, food, fashion and design - in Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan will be examined. The increasing global fascination of or craze for East Asian popular culture and how such East Asian "soft power" has inspired and transformed the global aesthetics and popular imagination or understanding of East Asia will also be discussed.