Asia Popular Culture

In this essay, I will focus on analysing two components of Asia popular culture: the first one is Globalization and Nationalism and the second is Cultural Imperialism. Also, I will reflect my understandings of both aspects and support my own points with some examples in Asia context as well as my everyday life experiences.

So, what is popular culture? Since culture refers to “the beliefs, way of life, art, and customs that are shared and accepted by people in a particular society” (Huang 2009, p.123), popular culture can be understood as a combination of various social activities in which the public involve actively. (Delaney 2007). To my knowledge, I simplify popular culture as cultural products in various forms such as music, art or fashion,

One of globalization’s major outcomes that we cannot neglect is cultural hybridization, which is the mixture of various cultures from Asian, American, African to European (Pieterse 1995, p.). Nowadays, the hybridity of cultures are frequently adapted into popular culture production of films and music. Thus, we are now bombarded with a huge wave of globalized knowledge and mixed culture overcame the boundaries of time and space, which created a sense that the world is one place and we are blending together. espite the major advantages, globalization may resulted in a loss of identity within nations (Featherston 1995, p.89). Therefore the nation states now have to face double pressure from both the globalization process and cuture reservation. If the national state cannot handle the situation wisely, its power can be weakened and its culture are in danger of losing national characteristic (Kinnvall & Josson 2002, p.257).

Nowadays if I turn on the TV, I can easily see a flood of foreign music, movie or commercials from national programs to cable TV channels. It is so difficult to find an authentic Vienamese programs without the mixture of global trends. If we continously being fed with an international “invasion”, or apply adapted culture immoderately, one day we might get confused when distinguish

Previous theories about cultural imperialism focused on how powerful country, especially the West, control the global media with one-flow information to other countries in order to effect their values, beliefs, ideologies and lifestyles (Tomlinson 2001, p.35). Consequently, cultural imperialism pushed us toward a “homogenized, Westernized global culture” which is empowered by the informational capitalism and the mass media (Ang 2007, p.8). Then around the 1990s, an economic liberalization enabled strong global flow of culture exchange for worldwide nations. As a result, the West’s domination is decentralized as the power of media is now strongly developed in many countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Japan or Korea. (Duong n.d, p.7). As I am discussing about popular culture in Asia, therefore I will show a case of South Korea and how it affects my understanding of cultural imperialism. The expansion of the Korean Wave to neighbor countries including Vietnam for the past decades was such a phenomenon. This transformed Korea from an ordinary consumer of one-way information flow by the West, to one of the most influential and powerful nations among