Global Circulation of Asian Popular Culture
Order Description
Brief description:
Choose one of the specified essay topics and identify an appropriate primary corpus, and
critically analyse how your sample texts have changed when placed in dialogue with
other cultures. You may wish to consider what is culturally specific about these texts, and
what has local and global significance. Your essay should not reproduce material dealt
with in your tutorial presentation or literature review.
Do NOT write about Japanese manga or anime, as these are comprehensively dealt
with in other units.
Task 4: Essay
Write on one of the following topics:
1. What advantages and disadvantages are there in making films which combine local
Asian themes and Hollywood-style production values?
Compare films from TWO countries in your answer.
2. Hollywood adapts and remakes Asian films as part of its insatiable search for new
stories, or for new ways of telling half-familiar stories. But adaptation is also driven
by perceptions of the otherness of Asian cultures from Western perspectives and a
presumed preference of audiences for localised remakes rather than originals. In an
analysis of a pair of films – a source and its remake – demonstrate what constitutes the
core cultural differences between the two.
3. Circulation of popular culture takes another form in film as International co-production, where the production companies involved are from two (or more) different
countries. International co-productions are an effective means of expanding the
overseas market, but what other advantages do they have? In an examination of two
films, explore the cultural implications of co-production, with particular attention to
disparate cultural ideologies.
4. Cultural similarity and distance are favourably but differently perceived by audiences
in East Asia in their consumption of media texts from neighbouring countries. A
further step – particularly evident in TV Drama series – is to produce a local remake of
such media texts. A remake can be a simple transposition from one setting to another,
or it can become an original creative work. Explore the possibility for creative
adaptation in selected scenes from a drama series that originated in one country and
has been remade in another (or in some cases two or three others).
[Please ensure that your chosen examples are available with English subtitles, and
give full details of your sources.]
Your essay should:
• be 3000 words;
? be presented in 12-pt font, 1.5-spaced, 2cm margins;
• use an approved referencing style, e.g. MLA, Chicago, Harvard, APA;
• be fully referenced with at least five relevant academic references (books, book
chapters or journal articles) (You can locate scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles by
using the library databases such as Project Muse or Academic Advanced Premier. You
can find these by using the Library’s Multi Search: >Databases>Project Muse, e.g.
You can also put a key word into Multi Search under books and articles, but you need
to be precise in your choice of term, or you’ll get hundreds of irrelevant references.
You may include graphics and website materials, but they will not be counted as
academic references);
? list “Works Cited” at the end of your essay. This should not be a general bibliography
or references, but contain all and only works cited within the essay;
• avoid the use of subheadings (a coherent argument should link components of a short
essay such as this); and
• minimise description of content and story elements – analyse!
In the iLearn folder, you will find assessment rubrics which clearly explain what will be
assessed, and how it will be assessed. Please use these rubrics for self-evaluation during
the research and writing process.