This volume represents the first sustained effort to cast the concepts of inter-Asia and intermediality into a mutually informative dialogue, questioning how they demarcate boundaries within area and media studies.
Probing beyond conventional definitions, the book examines how inter-Asian co-productions, vernacular intermediality, and transboundary outsourcing reconfigure cultural and area studies. Scholars of East, South, and Southeast Asian film and media based in North America and the Asia-Pacific explore how cinema draws on vernacular cultural and aesthetic forms including newspapers, radio, music, poetry, dance, and theatre. Chapters reveal how co-productions across national, linguistic, ethnic, and media boundaries unsettle understandings of region through the outsourcing of creative labor to animators, designers, programmers, translators, and dubbers in distant locations who concretely shape content meaning. This creative labor unveils hierarchies, frictions, and discontinuities that challenge bounded, homogeneous understandings of media circulation and regional identity.
Inter-Asia Intermediality is essential reading for scholars and students of Asian cinema and media studies, cultural studies, and area studies.