Call for Papers

Media Culture and Race Matters in Asia: Convergences and Divergences 

Deadline for Abstract Submission: September 15^th, 2017

The media—digital platforms, webisodes, multilingual media, mobile media, vlogs and other social media, film, radio, and TV—are essential to our everyday life. While it is true globally (with varying degrees) that the media impact and are intricately interwoven into what we do, think, and feel, the media are also a specifically regional phenomenon situated in time and place. These specificities of the media, however, are simultaneously transferrable and transformable across borders as they are built out of idiomatic and shared visual and verbal aesthetic systems. Since the development of the Internet and mobile communications in particular, it has, for example, become common for people in India to watch popular Korean television shows and vice versa, while adaptations across geographic and national boundaries have become a popular practice. Such global practices are re-constituting the boundedness of regions while the flow of media across borders challenges the very stability of categories of identity.

We in Media Culture and Race Matters in Asia examine the era of the media through two particular lenses, that is, Asia and race as they inform and are informed by the production and consumption of media. Contributors might explore the following or any other related questions:

1. How do the media in different Asian countries attend to issues of construction, consumption, and representation of race?
2. To what degree do the media from script to production and policy feed into or challenge racialized or anti-racist scenarios in Asia affecting the sociocultural and political landscapes more broadly?
3. How might the varied levels of economic development, cultural diversity, and political regimes in Asia renew our understanding of the relation between race and media?
4. How does the recent development of technology impact diversity and coherence of media cultures across Asia?
5. What are the implications and limitations of the inter-Asian approach to media and race studies and how might this approach reconceptualize Asia as a dynamic and interconnected formation?

While each contributor will bring his or her own analytical methodology, expertise, and interest to bear on the exploration of media and their relation to race in each distinct Asian country, the book as a whole pays close attention to the ways in which Asia collectively creates media and race cultures that are uniquely Asian and universally global simultaneously.

If interested, please send an abstract of 300 words to Maya Dodd (maya@flame.edu.in) or Hyesu Park (hyesu.park@bellevuecollege.edu) by September 15th, 2017.  Actual essays will be in around 6,000 words each.