This wide-ranging volume is the first to examine the characteristics, dynamics and wider implications of recently emerging regional production, dissemination, marketing and consumption systems of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Using tools based in a variety of disciplines – organizational analysis and sociology, cultural and media studies, and political science and history – it elucidates the underlying cultural economics and the processes of region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles.

Through discussions of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Philippine and Indonesian culture industries, the authors in the book describe a major shift in Asia’s popular culture markets toward arrangements that transcend autonomous national economies by organizing and locating production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Specifically, the authors deal with patterns of co-production and collaboration in the making and marketing of cultural commodities such as movies, music, comics, and animation.

The book used case studies to explore the production and exploitation of cultural imaginaries within the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural commodities and images. Drawing on empirically-based accounts of co-production and collaboration in East and Southeast Asia’s popular culture, it adopts a regional framework to analyze the complex interrelationships among cultural industries. This focus on a regional economy of transcultural production provides an important corrective to the limitations of previous studies that consider cultural products as text and use them to investigate the “meaning” of popular culture.