Panel proposal for Crossroad 2010, 17-21 June, Hong Kong

"Asian Pop Culture Fandom in Europe"

Traditionally, Asian pop culture's trans national consumption has been studied in terms
of strategies of global cultural industry, identity construction of diasporas and
migrant audiences, and regionalized dynamics of media consumption (Japan mania, Korean
Flow). Meanwhile, the recent and rapidly growing popularity of Asian pop culture in
Europe put forward a new set of questions. The huge popularity of Manga (especially in
France) and the fandom of Asian Pop music and TV drama among European consumers make
incomplete the existing thesis. For example, the growing popularity of Asian drama, and
in a degree that of Asian Pop music, is a pure web2 phenomenon that any cultural
industry theory can handle. Serial culture that the Manga and the Drama consumption
impose is quite different from that of Western seriality. It therefore provides an
intense intercultural interface of global era. It also implicates a new gender,
generation, and race relationship formation. Between fascination, addiction, and
aesthetic judgement, European fans of Asian Pop Culture are blurring the frontiers
between legitimate, dominating, and ostensible Western culture and "illegitimate"
(violent, infantile, emotional, and even free), docile and invisible Asian popular
culture. They are fans of Asian Film d'Auteur as well as that of popular TV drama and
Pop idols, paracinemaic critics at the same time camp viewers of Asian stars. This
cultural eclectism can provide an interesting field of Reception and Fan studies.

This panel aims above all to identify clearly the cultural dynamics of emerging Asian
pop culture fandom in Europe and hope to address the theoretical stakes as gender and
race relationship in global culture.

The communication proposal (150 word maximum and a short biography of the author) is to
be sent to : skhong AT wanadoo.fr, before the 31st January. (The deadline of panel submission is the 14th February)

Please feel free to contact me (skhong AT wanadoo.fr) for any
request on the panel programme, and  you can find the pratical information on the
conference web site : www.crossroad2010.org

Best wishes,

Sek-Kyeong HONG-MERCIER
Associate Professor, University of Bordeax, Laboratory MICA