Editorial introduction: American pop culture

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Notes

Chen (2001) suggests that a direct relation between an older kind of colonialism and new Cold War structures existed in Asia after 1945.

For instance, in South Korea, a book entitled Americanization (2008) contains articles written in Korean for Korean academic audiences; we suspect that there are similar texts in other countries.

Yoshimi (2003) furthers his thesis on Americanization into Asia by examining the decolonization processes in various Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, when many parts of Asia were incorporated into the Cold War and became part of the structure of American hegemony.

As an example, Chua (2000) shows that the particular use of McDonald's as a study space ‘familiarises’ it, in the senses of being familiar and familial.

In a similar way, Iwabuchi et al. (2004: 9) argue that ‘we still tend to think of global-local interactions by how the non-West responds to the West and to neglect the non-West countries “rework” modernities.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Beng Huat Chua

Contact address: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, AS1 #03-06, 11 Arts Link, Singapore 117570

Younghan Cho

Contact address: Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Graduate School of International and Area Studies, 270 Imun-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130791, South Korea