Global Chinese Media Cultures

4.0 credits

How do people, through media, imagine belonging and intimacy across divides and difference? How does media history tell social history? This course examines vibrant and shifting media cultures from multiple Chinese worlds to consider how media histories closely participated in social histories and shaped dynamic modes of affective belonging. We discuss how media arts and infrastructures were developed from disparate sociohistorical conditions of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Asian Americas and transnational diasporas, and what their convergences and divergences tell us about political and technological changes of the larger world. Moving across the landscapes of cinema, music, popular culture, digital platforms, and emerging media, we will consider the specificity of each medium and the ways that media crossings open up innovative ways of worlding beyond geopolitical borderlines. Taught in English.