Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia
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Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia

Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage

Liew Kai Khiun

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eBook - ePub

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia

Amnesia, Nostalgia and Heritage

Liew Kai Khiun

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About This Book

Transnational Memory and Popular Culture in East and Southeast Asia explores the significance of transnational popular culture in the formation and mediation of collective memories across the region. It looks at case studies including: the politics of cinematic remembering of Hong Kong films on Southeast Asia, the digital and holographic enshrinement of departed celebrities like Wong Kar Kui, Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng and the dredging of personal memories of the encounters with the Korean Wave in Singapore. In addition, it explores how cultural memories are used as focal points of staging cultural revival and movements in Singapore and Taiwan. Contrary to the assumptions of the importance of newness in modern popular culture productions, the continued relevance of this otherwise dated material reflects the significance of these texts in the development and strengthening of collective cultural memories. The discussion of such issues has often been grounded geo-spatially on the “national” and contemporary contexts, this volume will develop a more temporalized and transnational perspective in the shaping of otherwise local cultural identifications.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781783484386
Chapter 1
Introduction
Transnational Memories under the Vast Sky
On the night of 28 September 2014, thousands poured onto the streets of Hong Kong to protest against the use of teargas by the police in quelling otherwise peaceful demonstrators. One of the collective spontaneous actions of the crowd was their singing in unison of the city’s Cantonese popular music or Cantopop band Beyond’s Under the Vast Sky (æ”·é—Šć€©ç©ș). Written in 1993 by its lead vocalist Wong Kar Kui, who died that same year from an accident in Japan, the song has become synonymous with the youth-driven ‘Umbrella Movement’ pushing for more meaningful universal suffrage in a city under Beijing’s watchful eye. In Hong Kong’s otherwise largely apolitical entertainment industry, the song can be considered one of the household tunes stretching beyond the city. Through the Chinese diaspora in the region, Hong Kong–based popular culture of films, television and music has been diffused regionally in the post-war decades as part of the interlinked transnational transmission of East Asian–based popular entertainment from the multi-centres of Japan, Taiwan and, in the more recent decade, South Korea. At its peak in the early 1990s, Beyond’s popularity reached across East and Southeast Asia, and Vast Sky became an instantly recognizable rallying song for listeners outside Hong Kong who openly sang the song in Taiwan and Singapore to express solidarity with the protesters. Displaying their affection for Hong Kong through their years of exposure to its popular entertainment with which they grew up, individuals from outside the city had their cultural memories reignited by the replay of Vast Sky in this new political context. This shows that the transnational circulatory natures of popular culture texts are not merely spatial trails, but temporal traces as well. If the contemporary trails of ‘now-ness’ in the transnational popular cultures of East and Southeast Asia are characterized by traits of novelty and trendiness, familiarity and continuity are the affective traces of ‘pastness’.
Instead of being faded media residues of more dynamic and colourful pasts, Vast Sky shows that these traces are cultural archives and resources serving the local and transnational collective memories of East and Southeast Asia. Through remembrances, reminiscences, hauntings and recollections exhibited and performed by popular entertainment texts, this volume discusses the role of transnational cultural memories. By dredging and referencing a sense of ‘pastness’, these texts create new frames of connectivity in bridging the historical and cultural fluidities that are often marginalized by the ideo-political narratives of contemporary nation states. Like the case of Vast Sky, this project demonstrates the ways in which dredging of otherwise vestigial texts are actually critical in the formation of new narratives and identifications from interwoven transnational networks.
Even as new songs were created during the two-month protest, Vast Sky has shown the significance of cultural memories. Most probably acquired and familiarized from repeated late-night radio and television broadcasts, karaoke outings and, more recently, internet uploads, the persistent popularity of Beyond’s songs is likely the result of sustained everyday process of intergenerational cultural transmissions; a transmission that has, in turn, been drawn upon at a critical juncture as an organic social resource by a generation born after Wong’s death. Nostalgia, idealism, heritage, authenticity, vernacular, plurality, history, Cantonese and traditionalized, Beyond’s Vast Sky stands in contrast to the politics of displacement, erasure and amnesia commonly associated with Beijing’s grandiose projects of statehood. Against hegemonic memory-draining statist narratives and corporate projects, the protesters’ retrieval and re-contextualization of an otherwise dated song gave a new critical role to popular culture memories as part of the collective efforts in remembering to struggle, and the struggling to remember. In this respect, this spirit constitutes the basis of this volume on the significance of the circulatory nature of popular cultural memories as part of the fluid cultural resources available across a transnational level. Essentially, aesthetically and technologically reconfigured productions and performances of otherwise dated and forgotten popular culture texts as well as their accompanying politico-historical contexts are featured here. The haunting sensations of the modern electronic media’s constant disembodied presence in its ‘live-ness’ and simultaneity echo that which Marshall McLuhan pronounced to be the extension of mankind’s nervous system (McLuhan 1994 [1964]; Sconce 2000, 4). In this respect, this ‘haunting sensations’ of the electronic media should also have the potential to transform otherwise manufactured texts and passive consuming audiences into meaningful archives for remembering communities.
Traumatic Remembering and Nostalgic Retrospection to Regenerative Potentials
Contemporary scholarly understandings of cultural memories have their beginnings in Halbwachs’ (1980) conceptualization of collective memories as a description of the broader societal participation in often publicly displayed acts of remembering. Buttressed by public monuments, official ceremonies, museums as well as media and educational materials, collective memories have often been linked intimately to the projects of state-building in establishing and crystallizing founding myths (Meusburger, Heffernan and Wunder 2011). It was only from the 1980s that appreciation of the dynamism in cultural memories gained more traction. Prominent works instrumental in germinating the ‘global memory culture’ (Sinha and McSweeney 2011, 1) on the academic front include Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) and Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de MĂ©moire (1989). In revising the notions of collective memories and national identities in the 1990s, the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann gradually developed a more structured understanding of memories as either communicative or cultural.
As communicative memories are very much based on living memories, they are sustained by intergenerational transmissions of experiential knowledge and that which Assmann terms mnemotechnical functions in rituals and symbols. In contrast, there is no distinction between myth and history in cultural memories. As a consequence, cultural memories serve as remembered histories akin to that of religious fables invested in shamans and poets and are thus deemed by Assmann to be more hierarchical and formal (2011, 36–40). Here, he acknowledges the role of the multiplying modern media in imbuing greater complexity to the otherwise simple binary between communicative and cultural memories. In contrast to the formalized ‘classical’ texts and performances in cultural memories, the media in communicative memories serve as intergenerational embodied oral communications in often vernacular languages (Assmann 2008, 117). Assmann does recognize the limitations of this binary, which in the following discussion, is met with greater complexity in the effort to locate transient and intangible popular culture across contemporary national borders.
Through the digital and internet revolutions, the technologies of memories have given acts of recollection and remembering greater vividness and portability; trends have led to the growing prominence of the humanities in the otherwise scientific field of memory studies (Hoskins 2001; Huyssen 2000; van Dijck 2007). As Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (2009, 4) note, ‘Memory is also re-presentation, making experiences, as it were, present again in the form of images sensations or affects’. Leon Tan (2013, 390) emphasizes memory as an active movement rather than a storage bin of static representations, as he states: ‘For Deleuze, following Bergson, the past is not something that ceases to exist upon the succession of the present (actual) moment. Rather, the past coexists with the present in the form of memory, possessing a virtual reality of its own; the past is virtual, and as such, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”’ (ibid.). Therefore, at the cultural memory level, ‘we are inevitably dealing with representations, performances and re-enactments of memory’ (Plate and Smelik 2009, 4). It is in such practices that cultural memories are rendered as reflexive and future-oriented actions. Such actions would be potentially capable of neutralizing the coercive powers of tradition (Halas 2010, 313–14), mobilizing the suppressed knowledge and narratives of the past (Coplan 2000), and searching for audience communities (Kukkonen 2008) or networked assemblages in the digital age (Tan 2013). Through communities and networks, projections of cultural memories are recognized as both multidirectional and transnational within the circuits of globalization (de Cesari and Rigney 2014). Within the theoretical trends laid out here, how would transnational cultural memories be situated transnationally in East and Southeast Asia?
The discussion of cultural memory in the Asia-Pacific region has often been influenced by the traumatic violence of displacement and erasure from the politics of Cold War rivalry as well as the totalizing projects of statehood by postcolonial countries. Often superseded by the rapidity of change, unresolved injustices and unreconciled traumas have been left simmering as societies concerned choose between expediency of amnesia and the duty to remember in the region (Cheon 2015; McSweeney 2011; Um 2012). These tensions are not confined within the boundaries of the nation states recovering from violent episodes of civil strife; they are also evident transnationally, particularly in the strained multilateral relations over contemporary Japan’s reinterpretation of its role in the Pacific War.
If trauma falls on one side of the spectrum, ciphered sentiments of nostalgia for the more innocently simple pasts are on the other. For the populace subjected to relentless infrastructural and social changes in the region as well as intense urbanization and political transformations, the imaginations of a more uncomplicated past becomes appealing (Hillenbrand 2010; Wu 2010). One example of such an imagined past is the 2008 film, Cape No. 7 (攷角䞃號). In the production, a ciphered and endearing transnational narrative is constructed through the romance of a contemporary Japanese event organizer and a struggling Taiwanese rock musician running parallel to the separation between a Japanese soldier and his Taiwanese girlfriend at the end of the Second World War. Hong Kong–based director Wong Kar-wai’s references to Southeast Asian cities in some of his films like Days of Being Wild (é˜żéŁ›æ­Łć‚ł) and In the Mood for Love (èŠ±æšŁćčŽèŻ) also appear as tributes to the cinematic experiences of transit and travel connecting East and Southeast Asia in the earlier post-war productions of Hong Kong cinema (Chapple 2011). The affective dimensions of such nostalgia are, in turn, featured in popular media through screen reminiscences of either uncomplicated high school puppy love plots or enduring romances set within more troubled times. Unlike the anomie perceived by the digital contemporary world, screen societies of the past have also been presented to be more intimately communitarian and less materialistic. Ciphered as rustically lush countryside landscapes and charmingly laid out houses of the (pre-skyscraper) colonial era, accompanied by quaintly elaborate practices and elegant fashions, media nostalgia becomes a pleasant escape from the present.
From the frequency of these productions and their popular receptions across different countries in the region, a consensus is emerging on the shared transnational affiliation of nostalgia as popular cultural memories (Baik 2010; Iwabuchi 2002). While this volume does not deny such trends, it nevertheless seeks to present a more purposeful function of transnational cultural memories in the region that goes beyond the heavily charged commemorative politics of retrospective justice and aestheticized nostalgia. Instead, broader emphasis is given to the cultural memories evoked by the recollection of texts from otherwise daily popular entertainment. Daily popular entertainment or ‘dailiness’ defines modern popular culture as textured temporality constituted in the social practices of media production and use (Keightley 2012, 12; Scannell 1996). In this respect, cultural memories from daily consumption of popular entertainment would probably possess autonomous mnemotechnical functions, practices and audiences. Unlike the monuments and museums commonly used as sites of remembering in nation states, these more de-territorized transnational popular cultural flows or pop memories are probably more communicative in nature by Assmann’s categorization.
In terms of methodology, while sharing the similar tools of historicism in retrieving material archives and oral recollections in reconstructing and representing the past, approaches towards cultural memories are generally presentist. Constituted within ‘real environments’ of ‘living speaking subjects’, the frameworks of analysis are often that of psycho-social practices of reception and appropriation (Weedon and Jordan 2012, 146). As Nora puts it: ‘Memories are a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present’ (1989, 8). Hence, as much as much as I recognize the need for historicizing otherwise peripheral popular culture legacies in ‘collected memories’, the emphasis here is turned more towards identifying how collective memories are being exhibited and received. In other words, the intentions stem not so much from collecting oral histories from people who remember celebrities of transnational significance like Bruce Lee and Teresa Teng. Rather, it should be looking at the narratives and labour invested in the media ‘sites of memories’ in keeping their presence decades after their deaths. In addition, because of its amorphous dynamics, Kansteiner argues the study of cultural memories cannot be treated similarly as historical projects of documenting and aggregating of individual memories alongside an inventory of medico-social methods (Kansteiner 2002, 186–87). However, what can be significant in the cultural memory approach would be the evidences in practices that are invested in the temporal reversibility. Referring to Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss’s and Luhmann’s concepts of the reversibility and malleability of time, Halas (2010, 311) calls for a more culturalist perspective in studying cultural memories that embraces a more autonomous treatment of time and temporalities.
The various media platforms have been active in tying the region closer in re-remembering the past. Scholars of collective memories have often referenced Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope, whereby chronotypes can be understood as temporal, plural and porous (Harro-Loit and Koresaar 2010). It is through these chronotypes of film and television, music and performance that narrative presented and transmitted by the electronic media has been critical in re-scripting, re-activating and re-projecting these transnational popular culture memories. Understanding the selected chronotypes would require an array of approaches ranging from the more established textual readings found in cinema and television studies in the production of media texts to that of the newer fields of digital humanities and new media research. Closing the loop in the popular culture memory–based reception and activism would be that of a mixture of applied memory studies and that of performance studies. What I intend to demonstrate here are some of the varied possibilities in approaching the study in transnational popular cultural memories. Given their fluidity and transience, the study of transnational popular cultural memories emphasizes their regenerative potentials in resurfacing buried texts, reconnecting scattered audience communities and reigniting suppressed voices. The next section discusses the sources of these transnational tele-popular culture memories in East and Southeast Asia, and the ways through which they turn pastness into future-oriented cultural resources.
Love Generation: Transnational Asian Interpretative Communities
In 1997, eleven episodes of Fuji TV’s Love Generation (ăƒ©ăƒ– ă‚žă‚§ăƒăƒŹăƒŒă‚·ăƒ§ăƒł) revolving around the urban romance between two office workers, Katagiri Teppei (Kimura Takuya) and Uesugi Riko (Matsu Takako), became popular in Japan and the rest of the region. As these young urban professionals do not have to contend with the presence of familial constraints in the metropolis of Tokyo, they are free to connect romantically and intimately with each other in the privacy of their own apartments, and through the then emerging technologies of mobile phones. As part of a line of romantic television dramas that began with Tokyo Love Story (東äșŹăƒ©ăƒ–ă‚čăƒˆăƒŒăƒȘăƒŒ) in 1991, Love Generation signifies the regional experiential affective memories engendered by the transnational circulation of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Close to two decades after its screening, snippets of its more memorable scenes and theme songs from the drama serial are still uploaded and commented upon on the social media. There are also many print and broadcast media productions from Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan with such affective regional reach and memories. From teeny Bubblegum pop and adult ballads to soap operas, historical and martial arts dramas, the theme of modern romantic love has been pervasive.
The Love Generation encompasses those born in the three decades from the 1960s to 1990s; and their popular culture memories have been shaped by a mixture of ideo-aesthetic and technological developments. On the ideological front, the geopolitical contestations of the Cold War led the non-communist states in the Asia-Pacific region to expound a more autonomous and urbane sense of modernity and modern living ...

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