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Coproducing Asia: Locating Japanese-Chinese Regional Film and Media . STEPHANIE DEBOER . Minneapolis and London : University of Minnesota Press , 2014. 244 pp. $25.00. ISBN 978-0-9166-8950-7
Book Reviews
Stephanie DeBoer's Coproducing Asia is a welcome effort in locating and critiquing transnational popular film and media co-production projects from East Asia. It understands the regional film and cultural industries as undergoing constant centring and decentring since the Cold War era of 1960s into the new millennium (p. 12). DeBoer not only offers new contexts and trajectories of regional co-productions across Japanese and Chinese media capitals through these decades (p. 14), she also proposes a series of critical lenses and frameworks for addressing the dynamics and tensions inherent in regional co-production and its networking.
Considering the monograph a project delineating a much contested genealogy for Asian cultural (co-)production, DeBoer carefully frames her interrogation along three post-war moments to examine how film and media co-production trace an ever shifting topography of regional power relations. The main body of the book is threaded along a historical purview of these three moments, exploring the entangled and sometimes contesting yearnings for progress and visions for new regionalisms.
In the introduction, the author elaborates on crucial theoretical toolkits and key terms as she reviews the theories and methodologies used to examine regional co-production. For DeBoer, co-production needs to be approached as "a technology of assemblage" in order to "underscore its function as not only a material but...