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Challenging assumptions that have underpinned critiques of globalization and combining cultural theory with media-industry analysis, this book gives an account of the evolution of television in the post-broadcasting era, and of how programming ideas are creatively redeveloped and franchised in East Asia. In this study of television-program adaptation across cultures, the authors argue that adaptation, transfer, and recycling of content are multiplying to the point of marginalizing other economic and cultural practices. This is happening in television, but also in many other media and related areas of cultural production. Looking at China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, the study details practices that are variously referred to as formatting, franchising, imitation, adaptation, hybridity, bricolage, and even emulation. The authors show that significant re-modelling of local TV-production practices occur when adaptation is genuinely responsive to local values. Examples of East Asian format adaptations include Survivor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, The Weakest Link, Coronation Street, and Idol. The book offers alternatives models of media flow that demonstrate how Hollywood is losing its global grip. It deals with the history of the TV-format trade, a movement that has coincided with the rise of alternative centres of television production and distribution outside the US.

These essays highlight regional cross-fertilization in music, film, new media, and popular culture in Northeast Asia. They include analysis of gender and labor issues amid differing regulatory frameworks and public policy concerning cultural production and piracy.

This book explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, it examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999–2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferal, the author traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian cultural production interrogates conceptions of race, ethnic identity, politics, and transnational exchange. Ultimately, the book reads contemporary black/Asian cultural fusions through the recurrent themes established by the films of Bruce Lee, which were among the first—and certainly most popular—works to use this exchange explicitly. As a result of such films as Enter the Dragon (1973), The Chinese Connection (1972), and The Big Boss (1971), Lee emerges as both a cross-cultural hero and global cultural icon who resonates with the experiences of African American, Asian American, and Asian youth in the 1970s. His films and iconic imagery prefigure themes that reflect cross-cultural negotiations with global culture in post-1990 Afro-Asian cultural production.

Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for cultural production, from the arts and language to science and technology. How did the human mind—and the uniquely human ability to devise and transmit culture—evolve from its roots in animal behavior? This book presents a new theory of human cognitive evolution. It reveals how culture is not just the magnificent end product of an evolutionary process that produced a species unlike all others—it is also the key driving force behind that process. The book shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species—such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation—are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making. The book explains how animals imitate, innovate, and have remarkable traditions of their own. It traces our rise from scavenger apes in prehistory to modern humans able to design iPhones, dance the tango, and send astronauts into space. This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.

This book is a defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation, it argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, the book insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. It offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical — rather than celebratory — approach to new media.

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. This book investigates the activists engaged in free and open-source software to understand why, despite their efforts, they fail to achieve the diversity that their ideals support. The book shows that within this well-meaning volunteer world, beyond the sway of human resource departments and equal opportunity legislation, members of underrepresented groups face unique challenges. The book explores who participates in voluntaristic technology cultures, to what ends, and with what consequences. Digging deep into the fundamental assumptions underpinning STEM-oriented societies, the book demonstrates that while the preferred solutions of tech enthusiasts—their “hacks” of projects and cultures—can ameliorate some of the “bugs” within their own communities, these methods come up short for issues of unequal social and economic power. Distributing “diversity” in technical production is not equal to generating justice. The book reframes questions of diversity advocacy to consider what interventions might appropriately broaden inclusion and participation in the hacking world and beyond.

While immediately recognizable throughout the United States and many other countries, media mainstays like X-Men, Star Trek, and Transformers achieved such familiarity through constant reincarnation. In each case, the initial success of a single product led to a long-term embrace of media franchising—a dynamic process in which media workers from different industrial positions shared in and reproduced familiar culture across television, film, comics, games, and merchandising. This book examines the corporate culture behind these production practices, as well as the collaborative and creative efforts involved in conceiving, sustaining, and sharing intellectual properties in media work worlds. Challenging connotations of homogeneity, the book shows how the cultural and industrial logic of franchising has encouraged media industries to reimagine creativity as an opportunity for exchange among producers, licensees, and even consumers. Drawing on case studies and interviews with media producers, it reveals the meaningful identities, cultural hierarchies, and struggles for distinction that accompany collaboration within these production networks. The book provides a nuanced portrait of the collaborative cultural production embedded in both the media industries and our own daily lives.

This book provides an understanding of the inspiring, contradictory, hostile, resonant, and unarticulated ways in which Asian American and African American cultural formation occurs. Through the interpretation of labor department documents, popular journalism, and state discourses, the book historicizes the formation of both the construction of black “pathology” and the Asian “model minority.” Beginning with the Moynihan Report and journalistic reports about Asian Americans as “model minority,” black and Asian men were racialized together, as if “racially magnetized.” Through the concept of racial magnetism, the book examines both dominant and emergent representations of Asian and African American masculinities as mediating figures for the contradictions of race, class, and gender in post-civil rights U.S.A. The post-civil rights era names this specific race for U.S. citizenship and class advantage, when massive Asian technocratic immigration and decline of African American industrial labor helped usher in a new period of laissez faire class struggle and racial realignment. While the state abandoned social programs at home and expanded imperial projects overseas, state discourses posited that the post-civil rights moment was a period of imminent racial danger because Black Power and the Asian American Movement challenged the understanding that social equality through civil rights had been achieved. The book studies both the dominant discourses that “pair” African American and Asian American racialized masculinities together, and it examines the African American and Asian American counter-discourses—in literature, film, popular sport, hip-hop music, performance arts, and internet subcultures—that link social movements and cultural production as active critical responses to this dominant formation.