Ien Ang

Focusing on tensions between 'Asia' and 'the West' at global and national levels, Ien Ang reflects on the disparate meanings of 'Chineseness' in the contemporary world.

Living Between Asia and the West

On Not Speaking Chinese

Trajectories brings together cultural theorists not only from countries with a known historical tradition, but also from the East Asian locations of Hong Kong, Korea, India and Singapore.

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

Trajectories

Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is mainly produced - the television institutions. Ang draws on Foucault's theory of power/knowledge to scrutinize television's desperate search for the audience, and to identify differences and similarities in the approaches of American commercial television and European public service television to their audiences. She looks carefully at recent developments in the field of ratings research, in particular the controversial introduction of the `people meter' as an instrument for measuring the television audience. By defining the limits and limitations of these institutional procedures of knowledge production, Ien Ang opens up new avenues for understanding television audiences. Her ethnographic perspective on the television audience gives new insights into our television culture, with the audience seen not as an object to be controlled, but as an active social subject, engaging with television in a variety of cultural and creative ways.

Desperately Seeking the Audience

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media.

Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living Room Wars

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and , in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch. Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a `politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the trditional forcus on textual meanings to explore the structural and historical representations fo television audiences as an integral part of modern culture. Her wide-ranging and illuminating discussion takes in the battle between television and its audiences; the politics of empirical audience research; new technologies and the tactics of television consumption; ethnography and radical contextualism in audience studies; television fiction and women's fantasy; feminist desire and female pleasure in media consumption, and the transnational media system.

Rethinking Media Audiences

John Hartley

First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Volume 6

Cultural Studies

Robert C. Allen

Linda Williams

Ana M. Lopez

John Belton

Richard Abel

Noel Carroll

Naomi Greene

Christopher Orr

Jean-Loup Bourget

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

Pam Cook

Alan Casty

Charles Affron

Christian Viviani

Chuck Kleinhans

Charlotte Brunsdon

Cawelti, John G.

Gerould, Daniel

Brooks, Peter

Elsaesser, Thomas

Ruth McCormick

Ellen Seiter

A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama

Imitations of Life

Kay Anderson

Andrea Del Bono

Donald McNeill

Alexandra Wong

This book provides a timely and much-needed paradigm shift in our understanding of Chinatown, through an in-depth case study of Sydney’s Chinatown.

Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China

Chinatown Unbound

In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.

Yudhishthir Raj Isar

Phillip Mar

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them. The contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the ‘hype’ that accompanies it, especially when it is yoked to the notion of ‘soft power’; the second, to better understand how contemporary cultural diplomacy actually operates. In applying a cultural lens to the question, this book probes whether there can be such a thing as a cultural diplomacy ‘beyond the national interest’. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest?

Ien Ang

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