Cultural Bifocals on Chinese TV Series and Diaspora Fiction

by Sheng-mei Ma

Overview

The book explores how Chinese TV series and Asian Diaspora fiction are consumed, experienced, and adapted by and for audiences worldwide, particularly those of the Chinese diaspora.

It focuses or “zooms in” on well-known exceptional Chinese TV series such as Reset and The Bad Kids and “zooms-out” to explore a wider panorama of lesser known TV dramas and films. It also explores Asian American representations of “bespoke immigrants,” the Nobelist Kazuo Ishiguro and other “1.5-generation novelists,” a Canadian missionary’s memoir, a Taiwanese Canadian young adult fantasy author, among others. Through the analysis of this material, it reveals how some Asian American writers are themselves liable to portraying stereotypes of Asian immigrant communities, reinforcing familiar tropes of the white gaze. It also features an insightful analysis of Taiwan’s films and culture, highlighting how Taiwanese identity is represented and moreover shaped by crossstrait tensions.

Exploring a diversity of content and media consumption, this book will appeal to students and scholars of media studies, Cultural studies, Chinese studies, Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032836133
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Series:	Routledge Contemporary China Series
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He is the author of over a dozen books, including China Pop! (2024), The Tao of S (2022), Off-White (2020), Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017), The Last Isle (2015), Alienglish (2014), Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012), Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011), East-West Montage (2007), The Deathly Embrace (2000), and Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998).

Table of Contents

Part I Chinese TV Series Afar 1. Homing Laptop: Return to Reset via Chinese TV Series 2. Three Bad Kids, One Loving Killer: Red China Noir in Blakean Symmetry 3. Gaming Reincarnation inside the Chinese Pressure Cooker: Reading, Streaming, Teaching Reset 4. Suturing Old and New Chinas: Su Lun’s Bug and Billionaire Part II Asian Diaspora Fiction Anear 5. Bespoke Immigrants in Nisei Murayama, Accented Kim, and Mama Tan 6. One Small Yellow Kid, One Giant Nobelist: Deracination of Outcault’s Clown and Ishiguro’s Clones 7. The 1.5-Generation Are Different from You and Me: Fake Real Homecoming and Half Surreal Montage of Asian America 8. George Leslie MacKay: A Missionary of the Master; A Master of Missions 9. Judy I. Lin’s High Tea EXotica: Young Adult Orientalism to a T 10. Taiwan Shift in Anglophone Fiction and Memoir Part III Bifocals Off 11. Taiwan Meets Its Unmaker: Circum-I(sle) and gHost Films 12. Din Tao: Wǔ the Body Writ; Wù the Body Rid 13. Horsey-Come-Lately: No Asian American Superhero Comics until Little Monkey