In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long en...

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and , in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch.Living Room Wars highl...

Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?

Watching Dallas è considerato uno tra i primi e più importanti studi sulle audience televisive. L'autrice si concentra sull'analisi di un fenomeno poco accademico come quello rappresentato dalla serie americana Dallas. Il suo obiettivo non è soltanto descrivere le modalità attraverso cui gli spettatori concorrono alla creazione del significato di un testo come Dallas, ma individuare nuove coordinate interpretative rispetto al concetto di cultura di massa e alle potenziali forme di "imperia...

Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruc...

‘Chinatowns’ are familiar places in almost all major cities in the world. In popular Western wisdom, the restaurants, pagodas, and red lanterns are intrinsically equated with a self-contained, immigrant Chinese district, an alien enclave of ‘the East’ in ‘the West’. By the 1980s, when these Western societies had largely given up their racially discriminatory immigration policies and opened up to Asian immigration, the dominant conception of Chinatown was no longer that of an abject ethnic ...

As the strategic rivalry between the United States and China rapidly deepens, growing distrust and fears of China are once again shaping Australian media coverage and public discourse, with potent implications for Australia's China policy.At this crucial historical moment, Engaging China offers a full-throated defence of engagement. This volume brings together a diverse set of Australia's seasoned diplomats, experienced journalists and renowned scholars to assess the current state ...

Cultural Studies explores popular culture in a uniquely exciting and innovative way. From new kinds of writing to photo essays, the journal is both theoretically and politically rewarding.

Heritage and History in the ChinaAustralia Migration Corridor traces the material and social legacy of migration from China to Australia from the 1840s until the present day. The volume offers a multidimensional examination of the material footprint of migration as it exists in the migration corridor stretching between Zhongshan county in south China and Australia. Spanning the fields of heritage studies, migration studies, and Chinese diaspora history, Denis Byrne, Ien Ang, Phill...

Cultural Diplomacy: Beyond the National Interest? is the first book bringing together, from the perspective of the cultural disciplines, scholarship that locates contemporary cultural diplomacy practices within their social, political, and ideological contexts, while examining the different forces that drive them.The contributions to this book have two methodologies: the first, to deconstruct and demystify cultural diplomacy, notably the ‘hype’ that accompanies it, especially when ...

This special issue of Cultural Studies from 1989 looks at European Identities. The editor remakes that putting together a ‘European Issue’ for this journal proved to be a very intriguing task—not least because of the complexity of what ‘Europe’ means. Europe is not just a geographical site, it is also an idea: an idea inextricably linked with the myths of western civilization, and its implications not only of culture but also of colonialism. Twentieth-century Europe is also a political and...