Brian Bernards (University of Southern California)
Putting into productive dialogue theories of intermediality (Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, Evans’s Transmedia Television, Jenkins’s Convergence Culture) and inter-Asian critical regionalism (Chen’s Asia as Method, Duara’s Asia Redux, Spivak’s Other Asias), this presentation assesses how a post-Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) era of intensified but highly uneven economic, political, and cultural “regionalization” in Asia is reflected not just in the region’s film production and circulation, but also in its cinematic content: namely plot, casting, setting, dialogue, soundtrack, and cinematography. I assess three wildly popular domestic commercial films made in the 2010s from Taiwan, Thailand, and mainland China that thematize exchanges of popular culture and flows of tourism between East and Southeast Asia, illuminating how they are simultaneously the product of and inspiration for transmedia convergences and remediated experiences between travelogue fiction, manga, cinema, television serial drama, sports spectatorship, and tourist-oriented branding. Crossing national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries in various forms (by virtue of their setting in an Asian country outside the director’s home country or their translated dialogue in an Asian language that is not the native tongue of the director or screenwriter), these inter-Asian films self-reflexively critique, yet also reaffirm, hierarchical networks of inter-Asian soft power derived from the historically and culturally specific concerns of the producers and filmmakers. Through attention to the affective audiovisuality of inter-Asian cinema’s intermedial simulacra, I push back against a visually-biased “Asian cinema” paradigm that unwittingly reinforces an East-West bilateralism, arguing instead that the regionalized content of the films more precisely reflects modes of reimagining national cultures from divergent and uneven experiences of pop culture and tourism.
Brian Bernards is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is author of Writing the South Seas: Imagining the Nanyang in Chinese and Southeast Asian Postcolonial Literature (U of Washington Press, 2015 / National U of Singapore Press, 2016) and coeditor (with Shu-mei Shih and Chien-hsin Tsai) of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader (Columbia U Press, 2013). His articles have also appeared in several journals, including Asian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture.