This edited volume brings together scholars from eight countries to explore interactions of popular cultural flows, state politics, audiences’ receptions, and public debates in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam and China, and across the region as a whole. These investigations provide fresh conceptual and empirical insights into the study of the dynamic and complex interface of cultural adaptation, political identification and regional identity formation in the popular cultural consumption process in East Asia. The impact of cross-border popular cultural flows on East Asians’ competing national selves and the potential of translating pleasure from popular cultural consumption into regional integration urges are thus issues carrying political significance and consequence for East Asia, and possibly with serious repercussions on the world.
