Imaginaries of the Asian modern
Name
558730664-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
20.2 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
af84ec58f4c9b6770655bf5b8067a46f
Author(s)
Lé, Lan Xuân
Advisor(s)
Henry Jenkins III.
Alternative Title
Rationalist love in motion : fantasies of colonial modernity in trans-national Asian television
Date Issued
2009
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In an age of globalization, texts increasingly migrate not only out of their native medium, but their native countries as well. Within the East Asian region, a booming television program trade circulates television texts, both as programs and as formats for re-making within the native culture industry. In this paper, I examine the program Hana Yori Dango, a Japanese manga turned television program that has been produced in Taiwan, Japan, and recently Korea. In particular, the Korean adaptation called Boys over Flowers, which simultaneous caters to a national and export market, exists in cultural and historical tension with the originating authority of the Japanese version. Texts then, in this process of industrial adaptation and cultural indigenization, may be understood as contact zones where asymmetries of historical power battle. Examining the mismatch of Korean form and Japanese narrative in this television melodrama, the narrative traversal of modern spaces, and the reparative capacity of nostalgia in fiction, I expose a contested process of adaptation that defies the easy descriptor of "hybridity." Reading the text historically and comparatively, I locate not only the cultural specificities and anxieties that mark this program as Korean, but also the phantom of a common, regional imaginary of the Asian modern.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009.
"June 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-125).
Subjects
Comparative Media Studies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
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