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Transnational Korean Television: Cultural Storytelling and Digital Audience provides previously absent analyses of Korean TV dramas' transnational influences, peculiar production features, distribution, and consumption to enrich the contextual understanding of Korean TV's transcultural mobility. Even as academic discussions about the Korean Wave have heated up, Korean television studies from transnational viewpoints often lack in-depth analysis and overlook the recently extended flow of Korean television beyond Asia. This book illustrates the ecology of Korean television along with the Korean Wave for the past two decades in order to showcase Korean TV dramas' international mobility and its constant expansion with the different Western television and their audiences. Korean TV dramas' mobility in crossing borders has been seen in both transnational and transcultural flows, and the book opens up the potential to observe the constant flow of Korean television content in new places, peoples, manners, and platforms around the world. Scholars of media studies, communication, cultural studies, and Asian studies will find this book especially useful.

The reform of media regulation can be read as part of the wider movement towards democratisation in Thailand in the 1990s. Real progress was made in media reform, yet as the traditional control of the Army has been reduced, the power of commercial media monopolies has grown. The main threat to further media liberalisation is now the growth of private monopolies. This was exemplified by the election of Thaksin Shinawatra in January 2001, as he is a media magnate on an international scale comparable with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi. Both men have used their communications business as a path to political power. The first part of this chapter will summarise Thai ideas about civil society, television regulation and the political context of media reform, followed by an analysis of how civil society issues are represented on Thai TV. Broadly, there are urban news and current affairs programmes of an investigative nature, and then there are rural-oriented programmes featuring community participation, notably Lan Ban Lan Muang. Finally, the prospects for media regulation since Thaksin’s election will be considered. The progress towards media reform made in the second half of the 1990s has since stalled under Thaksin’s new government.

Writing a history of Indian television immediately begs the question, how do we want it read? Exhaustive chronological treatments anchor the field (Kumar 2000 ), ideological examinations reveal a Hindu-centric nation with serious consequences for religious and gender minorities (Rajagopal 1996 ; Mitra 1993 ; Van der Veer 1997 ), development analyses demonstrate the failures of a socialist state (F ü risch and Shrikhande 2007 ), and audience studies reveal complex negotiations among multiple identity positions (Mankekar 1999 ). These critical approaches to the study of television in India rightly expose power differentials that facilitate, through the centuries, the inequities of interwoven structures of imperialism, colonialism, casteism, and capitalist patriarchy. Most importantly, they highlight the chronic condition of distrust in postcolonial societies, making it highly challenging to legitimize profi table connections to global circuits as they modernize under the very conditions that once constrained them.

This chapter wants to argue two things: the first part suggests that reality television in Africa – specifically the series Big Brother Africa, which completed its third season in November 2008 – has had profound impacts for identity politics, gender politics, and the politics of class on the continent. In fact, these are the issues most commonly illuminated by reality television and I wrote about these in a previously published article. The second part of the chapter moves into less explored territory. In that previous article, I briefly discussed how specifically Big Brother Africa can illuminate the workings of globalization in Africa and, in particular, South Africa’s hegemonic role in that process. Here, I expand on my earlier argument by exploring that hegemony in the context of the growing Chinese presence in Africa. All economic and political indicators suggest that China’s growing investment in mining and infrastructure and its political clout relative to South Africa mean that it is destined to assume a place of prominence on the continent. But here I want to argue that if we want to understand how globalization plays out in Africa, we need to look beyond China’s military and economic expansion. For me, Big Brother Africa can help us make sense of these dynamic processes. South Africa has consistently remained the highest-ranking country in Africain terms of its “global competitiveness” as measured by the World Economic Forum. South Africa dominates regional markets in Southern Africa as well as remaining competitive in the rest of the continent against business rivals from United States and Europe. As it was under Apartheid, there is a close symbiosis between the continental aspirations and interests of the postapartheid state and that of South African business. The advent of democracy in 1994 has opened up African markets for South African business on an unprecedented scale. The South African state is very active on the African continent and keen to develop a leading role for itself. In fact, successive United States governments have viewed South Africa as a continental leader. For example, former President George W. Bush referred to former South African President Thabo Mbeki as his “point man in Africa.”4The South African government underwrites and actively promotes SouthAfrican business’s continental schemes through its “Proudly South African” campaign coordinated through an International Marketing Council situated in the Office of (the country’s) President since 2002, which links state nationalism with consumption. Separately a statutory Industrial Development Corporation (established in 1940) underwrites the business expansion of South African capital.

In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol-3 focused attention on how people in the Northeast Indian state of Meghalaya cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul, a finalist from the region. While some fans set up websites and blogs to generate interest and support from the rest of the country and abroad, others formed a fan club and facilitated efforts by a range of groups and organizations to sponsor and manage PCOs (public call offices) in different parts of Meghalaya, distribute pre-paid mobile phone cards, and set up landline voting booths. Recognizing the ways in which these activities were beginning to transcend long-standing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and spatial boundaries, state legislators and other politicians soon joined the effort to garner votes for Amit Paul, with the chief minister D. D. Lapang declaring Amit Paul to be Meghalaya’s “brand Ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence.”1 It seemed that this three-month-long campaign around a reality television program could set the stage for a remarkable refashioning of the socio-cultural and political terrain in Meghalaya. As one commentator remarked:When Meghalaya’s history is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases – one before the third Indian Idol contest and one after it. A deep tribal-non-tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel.

This chapter looks at one well-known format in reality television– Big Brother (Bigg Boss in India) – in order to shed light on the complicated relationship between the forces of globalization, national and local cultural formations and the dictates of commercially driven entertainment. It analyses the essential features of format television to argue that the very mode of its constitution as an economic and aesthetic object inclines it towards the global. The chapter elucidates the reality behind global cultural formations by discussing the two main theoretical approaches to the question of global culture – cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. It also offers some speculations about how reality television embodies global form and thus functions as a sort of “Bigg Boss” that dictates contemporary modes of meaningful behaviour.

This chapter critically evaluates changing definitions of ‘public’ in Indian television in relation to discourses of globalization and media privatization. It examines the debate over the nationalist agenda of public broadcasting in India in relation to the demands for alternative models of broadcasting, and the rise of private commercial satellite channels since the 1990s. It also discusses how representations of traditionally private desires of sexuality and intimacy in soap operas, reality TV shows and music television are redefining the public in India. It outlines the ways in which private desire is made visible — and thus made public — through the convergence of the television screen, the cinematic screen, the computer screen, and the mobile screen. It argues that binaries of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ force us into either/or debates even though such category systems are always-already hybrid in postcolonial societies such as India.

Gender and the contemporary audio-visual landscape of Mexico.

This book proposes contemporary decolonization as an approach to developing cultural economies in the Global South. This book represents the first critical examination and comparison of cultural and creative industries (CCI) and economy concepts in the Caribbean and Africa.

Colonisation bequeathed classical education, among others, to the African continent. The post-colonial utility, function and status of such a knowledge system have been questioned and resisted, and African knowledgebased institutions are making efforts to decolonise such systems. The decolonial project has also impacted popular culture in the sense that African identity and self-presentation are being interrogated using various methods. Adaptations and productions of classical myths are implicated in this discourse. Implicated adaptations serve as platforms for allegorical cross-cultural conversation on shared experiences of a people group, perhaps of an earlier generation with the assumption of partial or absolute continuities. Continuity discourse is problematic when two cultures are implicated, particularly, when one is a colonial culture and the other colonised. The unity of discourse is either affirmed, violated or reconstituted.

Over the last decade Spain and Mexico have both produced an extraordinary wealth of television drama. Drawing on both national practices of production and reception and international theories of textual analysis this book offers the first study of contemporary quality TV drama in two countries where television has displaced cinema as the creative medium that shapes the national narrative. As dramatized societies, Spain and Mexico are thus at once reflected and refracted by the new series on the small screen.

The years following the Cultural Revolution saw the arrival of television as part of China's effort to 'modernize' and open up to the West. Endorsed by the Deng Xiaoping regime as a 'bridge' between government and the people, television became at once the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party and the most popular form of entertainment for Chinese people living in the cities. But the authorities failed to realize the unmatched cultural power of television to inspire resistance to official ideologies, expectations, and lifestyles. The presence of television in the homes of the urban Chinese strikingly broadened the cultural and political awareness of its audience and provoked the people to imagine better ways of living as individuals, families, and as a nation. Originally published in 1991, set within the framework of China's political and economic environment in the modernization period, this insightful analysis is based on ethnographic data collected in China before and after the Tiananmen Square disaster. From interviews with leading Chinese television executives and nearly one hundred families in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Xian, the author outlays how Chinese television fosters opposition to the government through the work routines of media professionals, television imagery, and the role of critical, active audience members.

The aftermath of Japan's 1945 military defeat left its public institutions in a state of deep crisis; virtually every major source of state legitimacy was seriously damaged or wholly remade by the postwar occupation. Between 1960 and 1990, however, these institutions renewed their strength, taking on legitimacy that erased virtually all traces of their postwar instability.How did this transformation come about? This is the question Ellis S. Krauss ponders in Broadcasting Politics in Japan; his answer focuses on the role played by the Japanese mass media and in particular by Japan's national broadcaster, NHK. Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. Krauss argues that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Krauss guides the reader through the complex interactions among politics, media organizations, and Japanese journalism to demonstrate how NHK television news became a shaper of Japan's political world, rather than simply a lens through which to view it.

"Pretty Liar" explores the rise of language and gender politics on Lebanese television to tell the untold story of the co-evolution of Lebanese television and its audiences and how the civil war of 1975-1991 affected that co-evolution. The shift in public interest in television has been widely acknowledged and interpreted within an institutional context as a victory of the neo-liberal entrepreneurship of a new, agile brand over the government inefficiency of Lebanon's national station, Télé Liban. Yet, the role of the Lebanese Civil War in reshaping national television and broadcasting in Arab media following the emergence of the Lebanese Broadcasting Company in 1985 has been unexplored. Based on empirical data and grounded in theory by Arab and global researchers, "Pretty Liar" offers textual analyses of five Lebanese fictional series, three major and several additional periodicals, and nine literary works, and provides context from unscripted interviews with television administrators, anchors, actors, and freelance contributors, print journalists, and audience members. Khazaal seeks to offer new insight into how entertainment television became a site for politics and political resistance, feminism, and the cradle for post-war Lebanon due to the shift in practices and standards of legitimacy. The history of television in Lebanon is not merely the history of technology and business, Khazaal argues, but rather the history of a people and their continuing quest for a responsive television even during times of civil unrest.

The Brazilian television industry is one of the most productive and commercially successful in the world. At the forefront of this industry is TV Globo and its production of standardized telenovelas, which millions of Brazilians and viewers from over 130 countries watch nightly. Eli Lee Carter examines the field of television production by focusing on the work of one of Brazil's greatest living directors, Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Through an emphasis on Carvalho's thirty-plus year career working for TV Globo, his unique mode of production, and his development of a singular aesthetic as a reaction to the dominant telenovela genre, Carter sheds new light on Brazilian television's history, its current state, and where it is going--as new legislation and technology push it increasingly toward a post-network era.

This book is about the processes of globalization, demonstrated through a comparative study of three television case histories in Asia. Also illustrated are different approaches to providing television services in the world: public service (NHK in Japan), state (CCTV in China) and commercial (STAR TV, based in Hong Kong). Through its focus, Global Media addresses a considerable lacuna in the media studies literature, which tends to have a heavy Western bias. It provides an original addition to the literature on globalization, which is often abstract and anecdotal, in addition to making a major contribution to comparative research in Asia. Finally, it offers a thoughtful causal layered analysis, with a concluding argument in favor of public service television.

By the end of the twentieth century, Mexican multimedia conglomerate Televisa stood as one of the most powerful media companies in the world. Most scholars have concluded that the company’s success was owed in large part to its executives who walked in lockstep with the government and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled for seventy-one years. At the same time, government decisions regulating communications infrastructure aided the development of the television industry. In one of the first books to be published in English on Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante argues that despite the cozy relationship between media moguls and the PRI, these connections should not be viewed as static and without friction. Through an examination of early television news programs, this book reveals the tensions that existed between what the PRI and government officials wanted to be reported and what was actually reported and how. Further, despite the increasing influence of television on society, viewers did not always accept or agree with what they saw on the air. Television news programming played an integral role in creating a sense of lo mexicano (that which is Mexican) at a time of tremendous political, social, and cultural change. At its core the book grapples with questions about the limits of cultural hegemony at the height of the PRI and the cold war.

Shanti Kumar's Gandhi Meets Primetime examines how cultural imaginations of national identity have been transformed by the rapid growth of satellite and cable television in postcolonial India. To evaluate the growing influence of foreign and domestic satellite and cable channels since 1991, the book considers a wide range of materials including contemporary television programming, historical archives, legal documents, policy statements, academic writings and journalistic accounts. Kumar argues that India's hybrid national identity is manifested in the discourses found in this variety of empirical sources. He deconstructs representations of Mahatma Gandhi as the Father of the Nation on the state-sponsored network Doordarshan and those found on Rupert Murdoch's STAR TV network. The book closely analyzes print advertisements to trace the changing status of the television set as a cultural commodity in postcolonial India and examines publicity brochures, promotional materials and programming schedules of Indian-language networks to outline the role of vernacular media in the discourse of electronic capitalism. The empirical evidence is illuminated by theoretical analyses that combine diverse approaches such as cultural studies, poststructuralism and postcolonial criticism.

The Turkish television industry has undergone great transformation during the past three decades and enjoyed unprecedented success among national and transnational audiences alike. This chapter reconsiders the rise of Turkish television as a global player and an emerging national industry from a new theoretical perspective by situating Turkish television within the contemporary global developments of international television markets and within its own national history, economic, political, and cultural dynamics. By providing different examples of key turning points in its history, we offer a brief overview of TV production, distribution, and reception in Turkey since the beginning of the industry. We also illustrate how societal debates around television content, such as Turkish TV dramas (dizis), have ignited the question of representation and caused a struggle over official narratives, resulting in the entwining of the industry and production processes with politics. In our introductory chapter, we argue that with the increasing demand for content and the expansion of access to online TV platforms, emerging TV industries play an intricate and complex role in reshaping global television flows. Therefore, the case of the Turkish TV industry constitutes a significant example for understanding the current structural transformations in global television and sheds light on the interplay between national and transnational production, distribution, and reception processes.

Stuck between the political economy of the larger domestic television production industry and global market imperatives, I argue that Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals had to develop and implement a number of tactics to achieve a locally based transnational cultural industry able to withstand both global and domestic pressures. In this chapter I identify three main tactics employed by Turkey’s TV industry executives and professionals to combat the socio-economic and political challenges they face: These tactics are: (1) carefully managing the content to skirt government restrictions; (2) adopting the government’s soft power discourse and public diplomacy aspirations by cooperating with government officials and businesses in their cultural promotion and nation-branding efforts; and (3) adapting to global TV trends by undertaking rigorous marketing and branding campaigns. A discussion of these tactics in the Turkish case can help us understand how culture industries in the developing world, which had to integrate into a neoliberal media environment after the 1980s due to market- and state-driven policies propelled mostly by US-based global media giants, negotiate being locally based transnational culture industries in the face of increasingly authoritarian and right-wing domestic political climates.