EASC Colloquium

PRESENTER: Stephanie Deboer (Communications and Culture, IU Bloomington)

TOPIC: Co-productions and the Cultural Contingencies of New (East) Asia
DATE: Friday, December 9, 2011

TIME: 12:00-1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine 004

(Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.)

This talk addresses film and media co-productions not simply as a significant factor within the recent “rise” of transnational cultural production linked to East Asia.  Co-productions are also a productive site for addressing the contingencies and contestations through which the very desires for regional production are expressed.  Focusing on recent film and media co-productions produced among Japanese and Chinese language media capitals (Tokyo in interface with Taipei, Hong Kong and Mainland China), I will unpack practices whereby Mainland China has been utilized as a location/geography through which the possibilities of new Asian cultural production have been “worked through” in both imaginary and production terms.  “Working through China” here refers to the ways in which China signals the possibilities of new markets and new locations of production for regional film and media, certainly.  It also refers to the ways in which it simultaneously works as an imagined geography of regional promise.  In both cases, I argue for a critical and flexible understanding of scale if we are to understand the fissures at play here – if we are to unpack the media practices that not only work, but also fail to work, within the transformative terms through which regional cultural production has overwhelmingly been touted of late. 

Stephanie DeBoer is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her teaching and research interests include Japanese and Chinese language film and media, inter-Asia cultural studies, global media studies, and critical approaches to digital media in the context of globalization. Publications include a series of her interviews with Tokyo-based film producers, entitled “Interviews: Framing Tokyo Media Capital and Asian Co-Production” (East Asian Cinemas: Regional Flows and Global Transformations, Palgrave, 2011) and “Co-Producing Cross-border Action: Technologies of Contact, Masculinity and the Asia-Pacific Border” (Culture, Theory & Critique, 2011). 

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