Browsing by Author "Chow, Eileen Cheng-yin"

Brother Is a Street Musician – Viewing the Landscape of Modernity Through Popular Songs by Zhang Eujeong was originally published in Korean in 2006. Described as a “fascinating journey upstream into the past to understand where the current will bring the future of Korean pop music,” (Busan Ilbo Review, 2009) Brother Is a Street Musician does not deal with contemporary K-Pop; rather, it visits the first chapter of Korea’s popular music history, which coincided with Japanese colonization in the first half of the 20th century. Combining archival research with a critical analysis of the earliest popular songs, the early recording industry, the first modern era musicians and composers, and the first formation of the consumer masses, Zhang’s book seeks to address the essential question – how did a colonized people construct their own, unique form of popular culture? Today, popular music from Korea has established itself as a formidable, global cultural phenomenon, garnering the interest of not only the power players in the global music industry, but also scholars in many cross-disciplinary fields. As an academic inquiry into the first moment in the history of popular music from Korea, an English translation of this book will be an essential resource in today’s lively conversations around the emerging field of Korean popular music. Furthermore, as a companion to more books coming from Korea to meet the growing demand for resources with diverse perspectives in the study of popular music and culture from the periphery, this book can spur on thoughtful discussions about how dialogue between English academia and the academia of host-language countries/regions, facilitated by translation, can progressively enrich the way we expand knowledge about transnational phenomena as they flow across time, borders, and languages.

This thesis investigates the work and life experiences of an under-discussed and female-dominant Chinese diasporic community, Chinese immigrant teachers in American K12 education. I argue that, firstly, while being privileged as high-skilled professionals and enjoying more mobility compared to their domestic sisters, Chinese female immigrant teachers are also subject to the precarity and intersectionality deriving from the underfunded American education and their triple marginality of being women, Asian and first-generation immigrants. Secondly, the structural inequality of gendered labor performed in both the professional and domestic roles of female teachers tends to be reinforced in the diaspora. By adopting mixed approaches of interview-based ethnography and digital ethnography, this thesis offers a critical alternative to the masculine and material version of Chinese immigration and contributes to a more extensive intellectual effort to understand the systematic racial and gender inequality associated with globalization.

Gacha game is a new type of video game that gained popularity in the 2010s and the 20s. In popular gacha games such as Genshin Impact, Fate/Grand Order, and Blue Archive, like a video game version of lottery, players pay virtual or real currencies to obtain random valuable items or playable characters. In Embodied Fate, the author conducts a symptomatic reading of the gacha game: to analyze the desire structure of gacha gaming from the perspectives of media studies, ludology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Numerous theoretical frameworks and critical categories are used for the analysis, including database consumption, character merchandising, psychoanalysis, avatar theory and action theory of ludology, neoliberalism, and precarity. By contextualizing gacha games in the anime media mix, it is shown that the production and consumption of virtual characters are the foundation of gacha games’ desire structure. Also, the author purposes that over-possession, the sophisticated dynamics between the player and the character, boost the desire for repetitive gacha gaming. Last, the author puts gacha games in the wider context of late capitalism and shows that neoliberalism creates gacha games and gacha players develop parasociality with characters to resist the insecurity of their precarious lived experience.

This thesis is a study of the possibility and boundaries of narrating contemporary China, a country in which nationalism is one of the dominant ideologies. It revolves around the dichotomy—the hypervisibility and invisibility of nationalism—which normalizes the omnipresence of nationalist sentiments in the everyday Chinese experience. The thesis first offers a general discussion about the discourse of contemporary Chinese nationalism. Then, it closely examines two case studies, the Chinese vlogger Li Ziqi whose videos have gained global popularity, and Chinese author Fangfang whose online diary documenting Wuhan’s COVID-19 outbreak received challenged reception on Chinese social media. The two seemingly apolitical projects eventually raised nationalist sentiments of Chinese Internet users, who praised Li Ziqi for promoting traditional Chinese culture to the world and attacked Fangfang for undermining global views of China during the pandemic. The two media representations generate two different national identities of the present-day China: an anti-modern, neo-traditional civilization and a modern, impeccable global leader. I conclude with the argument that the contradictory opinions on modernity in Chinese national identity construction is a confusion generated in modernization. They are essentially the legacy of the confrontation between historical Sino-centrism and western modernity.

Using the Chinese "Harry Potter" danmei tongren fandom as an example, this thesis discusses the specific reading and writing habits of the Chinese danmei tongren fans. "Danmei tongren" is a Chinese umbrella term for fan fiction about male homoerotic romance that uses characters from popular texts. It is a type of popular culture appreciated mainly by young Chinese female netizens. The thesis is divided into two chapters. The first chapter discusses the reasons why danmei has become the mainstream genre/modality of tongren writing in contemporary PRC, by exploring the lineage of Chinese tongren culture and the desire and needs of its major female participants. The second chapter analyzes the specific fannish reading and writing habits fostered by online communities from the perspectives of the relationship between fans and the source texts, the interactions and conflicts between tongren readers and writers, and fans' literary innovation under communal limitations. Based on participant observation of fan practices, textual analysis of fan texts, and qualitative interviews with eight Harry Potter danmei tongren fans, I argue that danmei tongren fans' reading and writing are shaped and mediated by the complex negotiations in the intimate online community built and connected by fans' emotional investments.

This thesis seeks to examine how identity and language are formulated, negotiated, and destabilized in Lee Yang-ji’s novellas, Yuhi (1989) and Kazukime (1983), particularly when these works are translated into a third language, English. Both stories are deeply embedded in the history of the Zainichi Korean community in Japan, and offer valuable insight into the trials and tribulations faced by Korean-Japanese, especially women, as they struggle between Japan and Korea. These translations and introduction hope to highlight the painful schisms and blurring boundaries in identity that Lee’s characters experience, whether they are Zainichi Korean, Korean, or Japanese. This project also attempts to emphasize the simultaneously mediating and limiting role that language performs in Lee’s works, where the very act of language necessitates a choice between Japanese and Korean, and Japan and Korea.