East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Current Issue

In recent years, there have been numerous English-language reports on the purported censorship of Peppa Pig in China. This article goes beyond this discourse to explore both how this British animation was translated into Chinese popular culture and how English-language news outlets subsequently responded to Peppa’s presence in China. Firstly, it examines how the dubbing of Peppa Pig into Chinese facilitated promotional claims about the universal appeal of this animation. Secondly, it shows how Peppa Pig’s subsequent popularity in China prompted a promotional shift towards a self-conscious localization of the brand with the release of the film 小猪佩奇过大年 (Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year). Thirdly, this article explores how English-language news reporting became distorted in its claims about the extent of Peppa Pig’s censorship in China. Theoretically, I argue that both the localization of Peppa Pig and English-language journalistic discourse about the animation in China have been permeated by an afterlife of Orientalism. As an afterlife, this is a discourse that lacks the all-encompassing qualities of Edward Said’s classic Orientalism, but that continues to draw upon the Orientalist idea of an absolute distinction between ‘the East’ and ‘the West’.

This article studies internet celebrity culture as a crucial site of public learning and pedagogy, exploring the capacity of celebrated foreign speakers of Chinese to popularize discourses and knowledge of the language on social media. It specifically focuses on the YouTube channel MYBY founded by Martin Wiley Woods and Blair Sugarman, two foreign television personalities in China who have successfully extended their fame from traditional media to the internet. Through a multimodal discourse analysis of their bilingual ‘talk shows’ in which they evaluate the Chinese pronunciation and accents of other non-native speakers and share their own learning experiences, we discuss how Woods and Sugarman perform their identities as both model learners and language influencers by producing and challenging the language ideologies of normativity and speakerhood. We argue that internet celebrity pedagogy is an increasingly important genre of popular culture that discursively shapes the global transmission of Chinese language and linguaculture.

Chinese online literature has attracted wide overseas attention over the past decade. As a newly emerging form of literature in the twenty-first century, the ‘digitalness’ of this literary form enables its translators to overcome the cultural gap and introduce this subculture to the rest of the world. The translation of Chinese online literature plays a significant role in its worldwide dissemination, greatly facilitates the promotion of Chinese culture and also sheds new light on multimedia translation studies. This article will focus attention on the translation of Chinese online literature in the anglophone world, aiming to map out a detailed overview of its overseas journey, namely how it made its way to the anglophone audience, to elaborate on the role of translation in this process, and how the translation of Chinese online literature facilitates the reception of the novels and contributes to their popularity outside China. Finally, this article argues that the human translation of online literature, tailored to this digital form, could bring insights into the promotion of Chinese culture and also into studies on multimedia translation.

The genre of boys’ love (BL) has enjoyed huge popularity since its Japanese beginnings in the 1960s, and it has taken root in popular cultures in many countries. BL arrived in China via fan translations of Japanese manga into Chinese. With the rise of online fiction platforms in China, local writers produced widely popular male–male romances that gained traction locally and abroad. The outflow of Chinese BL mirrors fan activities that led to the popularity of Japanese manga and anime in the United States. Fan translations of Chinese-to-English BL fiction are one of the most important links in introducing Chinese BL to the rest of the world. This article focuses on the cultural outflow of Chinese BL through fan translations in gloBLizing the genre. Through interviews with five teams and one individual fan translator, this article examines their roles played in the dissemination of BL web novels beyond the native Chinese-speaking world. These fan translators all resided in anglophone countries, and are diverse in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds, ages and BL interests. We interviewed fan translators that translated works from fantasy, alternative history and contemporary romance. Some of these works have been adapted into multimedia and some have not.

This article uses the framework of literary Occidentalism to study how an unequal power relationship is staged between Japan and Europe within isekai, a popular genre of contemporary Japanese fiction. Within the standard isekai plot, a teenage Japanese boy is suddenly transferred into a fantasy version of medieval Europe. There, the protagonist is bestowed superpowers that let him exert great agency over this second world, where he embarks on an exciting adventure and generally acts as he pleases. This superpower mediates and assures the protagonist’s introduction of western modernity, under the mantle of Japanese custom, back to the West. By negating medieval Europe, ‘Japan’ thereby becomes its own fantasy, a site at once more modern than the West and yet identifiably Japanese. Engaging in close readings of two key isekai light novels, Yamaguchi Noboru’s The Familiar of Zero and Nagatsuki Tappei’s Re:Zero: Starting Life in Another World, this article specifies and identifies common narrative tropes within isekai such as an identification with Japan, a dismissal of Europe as irrational and misguided, a moralized rescue of Europeans with the protagonist’s superpower, and a dismissal of potential counterarguments to the protagonist’s moral presumptions.

Review of: History and Popular Memory: The Power of Story in Moments of Crisis, Paul A. Cohen (2017)

New York: Columbia University Press, 279 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-23116-637-9, p/bk, $27

Review of: Regimes of Desire: Young Gay Men, Media, and Masculinity in Tokyo, Thomas Baudinette (2021)

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 262 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-47203-861-9, p/bk, £27.95

Review of: Manga: A Critical Guide, Shige (CJ) Suzuki and Ronald Stewart (2023)

London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 280 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35007-235-0, h/bk, $90.00

ISBN 978-1-35007-234-3, p/bk, $29.95