X`
of the modernity other than the Western model can we imagine? This is not a question
of how the television viewers in the non-Western societies appropriate or consume
American television dramas. The crucial question is where alternative forms of
modernity lie. East Asian critical MCS researchers always have a feeling of
powerlessness vis-à-vis Western influence whenever they are pursuing alternative forms
for their own societies. The West is not the “other” they can work together with on equal
footing, but the West has been the model that non-Westerners always try to emulate.
Conclusion: Reconstructing East Asian Media and Cultural Studies
For the past twenty years MCS in the region have produced a number of texts on
ideology and cultural representation through textual analysis and audience studies.
Postmodern theories and the Gramscian theory of hegemony have been introduced as
the dominant theoretical frameworks. In addition, a diversity of loosely connected
intellectual constructs such as the politics of the image, fantasy, and desires, the politics
of representation, as well as the politics of space and location were introduced
simultaneously into the local intellectual fields. Not only were concepts and theories
imported, research questions were also brought in too. East Asian MCS have actively
addressed new problematics and social realities – the formation of consumer society, the
politics of body and desire, and the identities of gender, ethnicity, and class – by
employing sophisticated metropolitan theories. Having said this, more often than not
East Asian MCS have dealt with the emerging politics of consumer culture and gender
at the abstract and generalized levels. In other words, by predominantly engaging in the
theoretical construction of consumer and youth culture as well as gendered identity-
Convention