The Making Of The Asia Pacific

Critically surveying the power of narratives in shaping the discourse on the post-Cold War Asia Pacific, See Seng Tan examines the purposes, practices, power relations, and protagonists behind policy networks such as the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council. The author argues that, filled with economic, social, and political meaning, the policy and academic discourses regarding the Asia Pacific and its subregions authorize and provoke certain understandings while preventing counternarratives from emerging.

This book provides a contemporary overview of developing areas of copyright law in the Asian Pacific region. While noting the tendency towards harmonisation through free trade agreements, the book takes the perspective that there is a significant amount of potential for the nations of the Asian Pacific region to work together, find common ground and shift international bargaining power. Moreover, in so doing, the region can tailor any regional agreements to suit local needs. The book addresses the development of norms in the region and the ways in which this can occur in light of the specific nature of the creator–owner–user paradigm in the region and the common interests of Indigenous peoples.

The Pacific, long a source of fantasies for EuroAmerican consumption and a testing ground for the development of EuroAmerican production, is often misrepresented by the West as one-dimensional, culturally monolithic. Although the Asia/Pacific region occupies a prominent place in geopolitical thinking, little is available to readers outside the region concerning the resistant communities and cultures of Pacific and Asian peoples. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production fills that gap by documenting the efforts of diverse indigenous cultures to claim and reimagine Asia/Pacific as a space for their own cultural production. From New Zealand to Japan, Taiwan to Hawaii, this innovative volume presents essays, poems, and memoirs by prominent Asia/Pacific writers that resist appropriation by transnational capitalism through the articulation of autonomous local identities and counter-histories of place and community. In addition, cultural critics spanning several locations and disciplines deconstruct representations--particularly those on film and in novels--that perpetuate Asia/Pacific as a realm of EuroAmerican fantasy. This collection, a much expanded edition of boundary 2, offers a new perception of the Asia/Pacific region by presenting the Pacific not as a paradise or vast emptiness, but as a place where living, struggling peoples have constructed contemporary identities out of a long history of hegemony and resistance. Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production will prove stimulating to readers with an interest in the Asia/Pacific region, and to scholars in the fields of Asian, American, Pacific, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Contributors. Joseph P. Balaz, Chris Bongie, William A. Callahan, Thomas Carmichael, Leo Ching, Chiu Yen Liang (Fred), Chungmoo Choi, Christopher L. Connery, Arif Dirlik, John Fielder, Miriam Fuchs, Epeli Hau`ofa, Lawson Fusao Inada, M. Consuelo León W., Katharyne Mitchell, Masao Miyoshi, Steve Olive, Theophil Saret Reuney, Peter Schwenger, Subramani, Terese Svoboda, Jeffrey Tobin, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Whittier Treat, Tsushima Yuko, Albert Wendt, Rob Wilson

Musical sounds are some of the most mobile human elements, crossing national, cultural, and regional boundaries at an ever-increasing pace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whole musical products travel easily, though not necessarily intact, via musicians, CDs (and earlier, cassettes), satellite broadcasting, digital downloads, and streaming. The introductory chapter by the volume editors develops two framing metaphors: “traveling musics” and “making waves.” The wave-making metaphor illuminates the ways that traveling musics traverse flows of globalization and migration, initiating change, and generating energy of their own. Each of the nine contributors further examines music—its songs, makers, instruments, aurality, aesthetics, and images—as it crosses oceans, continents, and islands. In the process of landing in new homes, music interacts with older established cultural environments, sometimes in unexpected ways and with surprising results. They see these traveling musics in Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific as “making waves”—that is, not only riding flows of globalism, but instigating ripples of change. What is the nature of those ripples? What constitutes some of the infrastructure for the wave itself? What are some of the effects of music landing on, transported to, or appropriated from distant shores? How does the Hawai‘i-Asia-Pacific context itself shape and get shaped by these musical waves? The two poetic and evocative metaphors allow the individual contributors great leeway in charting their own course while simultaneously referring back to the influence of their mentor and colleague Ricardo D. Trimillos, whom they identify as “the wave maker.” The volume attempts to position music as at once ritual and entertainment, esoteric and exoteric, tradition and creativity, within the cultural geographies of Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific. In doing so, they situate music at the very core of global human endeavors.

This book demonstrates how active and meaningful collaboration between researchers and local stakeholders and indigenous communities can lead to the co-production of knowledge and the empowerment of communities. Focusing on the Asia Pacific region, this interdisciplinary volume looks at local and indigenous relations to the landscape, showing how applied scholarship and collaborative research can work to empower indigenous and descendant communities. With cases ranging across Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Pohnpei, Guam, and Easter Island, this book demonstrates the many ways in which co-production of knowledge is reconnecting local and indigenous relations to the landscape, and diversifying the philosophy of human-land relations. In so doing, the book is enriching the knowledge of landscape, and changing the landscape of knowledge. This important contribution to our understanding of knowledge production will be of interest to readers across Anthropology, Archaeology, Development, Geography, Heritage Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Policy Studies.

This book promotes the creation of advanced knowledge-based economies driven by innovation networks and the continuous development of human capital and capability. It provides valuable insights into the growing emergence of knowledge-based industries of the Asia Pacific, and highlights research on: modes of creativity and innovation; intellectual property; the components of national innovation systems such as firms, education and training; knowledge and technical infrastructure; and public policy. The Asia Pacific region is currently in the process of transforming from being the manufacturing centre of the global economy to a centre of innovation for the knowledge economy, with the successful IPO of Alibaba in 2014 being a prime example of this shift. From a neo-Schumpeterian perspective, the region is increasingly engaged in shortening and intensifying cycles of innovation. The historic agreement at the Beijing APEC meeting between China and the US to radically reduce carbon emissions indicates that one imperative of this innovation is to contribute to sustainability. The fact that the US Government is moving away from this historic commitment, while the Chinese Government is endorsing the commitment, indicates an emerging opportunity for Asia to lead the world technologically in a vital industrial sector of the future.

As social, locative, and mobile media render the intimate public and the public intimate, this volume interrogates how this phenomenon impacts art practice and politics. Contributors bring together the worlds of art and media culture to rethink their intersections in light of participatory social media. By focusing upon the Asia-Pacific region, they seek to examine how regionalism and locality affect global circuits of culture. The book also offers a set of theoretical frameworks and methodological paradigms for thinking about contemporary art practice more generally.

Comprehensive and controversial, this book critically examines Japan's economic presence in Asia.