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Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book
bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural
disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural
diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological
contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them. The
contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to
deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the 'hype'
that accompanies it, especially when it is yoked to the notion of
'soft power'; the second, to better understand how contemporary
cultural diplomacy actually operates. In applying a cultural lens
to the question, this book probes whether there can be such a thing
as a cultural diplomacy 'beyond the national interest'. This book
was originally published as a special issue of the International
Journal of Cultural Policy.
Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the
television audience. Yet, despite the central place television
occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex
and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited.
Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand
so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises
directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official
knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of
this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is
mainly produced - the television institutions. Ang draws on
Foucault's theory of power/knowledge to scrutinize television's
desperate search for the audience, and to identify differences and
similarities in the approaches of American commercial television
and European public service television to their audiences. She
looks carefully at recent developments in the field of ratings
research, in particular the controversial introduction of the
`people meter' as an instrument for measuring the television
audience. By defining the limits and limitations of these
institutional procedures of knowledge production, Ien Ang opens up
new avenues for understanding television audiences. Her
ethnographic perspective on the television audience gives new
insights into our television culture, with the audience seen not as
an object to be controlled, but as an active social subject,
engaging with television in a variety of cultural and creative
ways.
In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.
Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and , in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch. Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a `politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the trditional forcus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations fo television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption, and the transnational media system.
Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. What does our media audiencehood say about our everyday lives and social relations, and how does it illuminate the condition of contemporary culture ? Ang suggests that we cannot understand media audiences without deconstructing the category of `audience' itself as an institutional and discursive construct. Her accessible style throws light on some of the complexities of media consumption in a postmodern world, including those related to gender politics and the globalization of culture. Living Room Wars points to the inherently contradictory nature of the media's role in shaping our identities, fantasies and pleasures, imbricated as they are in the exigencies of capitalist consumption and the institutions of the modern nation-state. Living Room Wars presents an indespensible tool for bridging audience studies, media studies and the larger concerns of cultural studies. eBook available with sample pages: PB:0415128013 EB:0203129431
"Cultural Studies" explores popular culture in a uniquely exciting
and innovative way. From new kinds of writing to photo essays, the
journal is both theoretically and politically rewarding.
Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is mainly produced - the television institutions. Ang draws on Foucault's theory of power/knowledge to scrutinize television's desperate search for the audience, and to identify differences and similarities in the approaches of American commercial television and European public service television to their audiences. She looks carefully at recent developments in the field of ratings research, in particular the controversial introduction of the `people meter' as an instrument for measuring the television audience. By defining the limits and limitations of these institutional procedures of knowledge production, Ien Ang opens up new avenues for understanding television audiences. Her ethnographic perspective on the television audience gives new insights into our television culture, with the audience seen not as an object to be controlled, but as an active social subject, engaging with television in a variety of cultural and creative ways. eBook available with sample pages: EB:020313334X
This book should be of interest to general readers, as well as
students of cultural studies and communication.
Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas,
offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about
Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly
is its entertainment constructed?
Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?
Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book
bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural
disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural
diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological
contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them. The
contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to
deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the 'hype'
that accompanies it, especially when it is yoked to the notion of
'soft power'; the second, to better understand how contemporary
cultural diplomacy actually operates. In applying a cultural lens
to the question, this book probes whether there can be such a thing
as a cultural diplomacy 'beyond the national interest'. This book
was originally published as a special issue of the International
Journal of Cultural Policy.
In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.
'Chinatowns' are familiar places in almost all major cities in the
world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red
lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant
Chinese district, an alien enclave of 'the East' in 'the West'. By
the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their
racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian
immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer
that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as
a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By
the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural
constructions of Chinatown as an 'other' space - whether negative
or positive - have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of
accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book
provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard,
through an in-depth case study of Sydney's Chinatown. It speaks to
the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia
(and especially China) together; not just economically, but also
socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing
transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further,
the book elicits a particular sense of a placein Sydney's
Chinatown: that of an inte-connected world in which Western and
Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist
legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex
delimitations.. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and
contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global
balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
'Chinatowns' are familiar places in almost all major cities in the
world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red
lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant
Chinese district, an alien enclave of 'the East' in 'the West'. By
the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their
racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian
immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer
that of an abject ethnic ghetto: rather, Chinatown was now seen as
a positive expression of multicultural heritage and difference. By
the early 21st century, however, these spatial and cultural
constructions of Chinatown as an 'other' space - whether negative
or positive - have been thoroughly destabilised by the impacts of
accelerating globalisation and transnational migration. This book
provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in this regard,
through an in-depth case study of Sydney's Chinatown. It speaks to
the growing multilateral connections that link Australia and Asia
(and especially China) together; not just economically, but also
socially and culturally, as a consequence of increasing
transnational flows of people, money, ideas and things. Further,
the book elicits a particular sense of a place in Sydney's
Chinatown: that of an interconnected world in which Western and
Asian realms inhabit each other, and in which the orientalist
legacy is being reconfigured in new deployments and more complex
delimitations. As such, Chinatown Unbound engages with, and
contributes to making sense of, the epochal shift in the global
balance of power towards Asia, especially China.
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