Letter from the Editors

It is a confronting thought that, in our present time, popular culture is both a discrete concept and a universal phenomenon. Universal because it is contained in almost every encounter in our daily lives, either explicitly or through inflection. In a different time, in “the old days,” it was proportionately far easier to differentiate popular culture from high or classic culture because the value system implied that the former was always more debased and simplified, the child to the adult. This has decisively changed, and what compounds the problems of classification and understanding is the very diversity of popular culture and that it is now a sub-branch of high culture or, rather, that high culture is a sub-branch of it. If there had to be denominating factors for why this is the case, it is due to accessibility and consumption. Hundreds of iterations of every masterpiece are available over the internet, and anyone who has been to a museum lately will observe that a large portion of observers do not look at works of art but instead consume them through taking pictures and walking away, certifying that they were there. This state of affairs is not exclusively negative, as we can incontestably argue that activities such as rock music and jazz, once relegated to the lower orders of music, have their pantheon of great and venerated artists. The hard part of this messy configuration of culture is trying to discern the good from the bad, quality from dross. How we navigate popular culture, judging and reading it, can also be challenging. The articles in this issue attest to the rich diversity of what popular culture means and what it can encounter. They range from film to art history to literature and migration. If popular culture is everywhere, the critical keynote is how you appraise it.In “Hegemony, Subalternality, and Subjectivity in the Emergence of Chinese ‘Losers’ Films,’” Hui Shu addresses a genre that is arguably specific to Chinese cinema and emerged as a result of the socialist authoritarian system. “Loser” (diaosi) films, Shu contends, began around the new millennium and center on a male, middle-class protagonist who is pitted against the rigid social and governmental system and bound to fail. Although framed as narratives of resistance and defiance, Shu argues, “these narrative portrayals ultimately conform to the system, reinforcing subordinated, consumerist, patriarchal and egoistic identities on the screen.” Shu’s essay uncovers a powerful subterfuge within Chinese mainstream film which is to divert the notion of resistance back to the level of conformity. That these mechanisms are covert is a testament to the soft power of popular culture.Working in a register that brings psychoanalytic and critical theory together with art history, Keith Broadfoot’s analysis, “John Glover and the Primal Scene of Australian Art,” explores the role of the spectral and the ghostly in the work of a celebrated colonial artist, which, he argues, has ramifications for a broader understanding of Australian art. Glover arrived in Tasmania, a newly established part of the colony, when already in middle age and a recognized artist in England, known as the “English Claude” for his ability to pastiche the seventeenth-century master of landscape Claude Lorrain. Glover saw in Tasmania a paradise, as reflected in his letters and in many works. But it is a paradise, Broadfoot notes, that is haunted by the presence of the Indigenous peoples. Although Glover represented them as the noble savage, grueling conflicts between white and black residents led, ultimately, to the eradication of the Indigenous peoples of this region. Uncannily, as Broadfoot observes, Glover’s last painting in 1846 was of a corroboree, a sacred Aboriginal ritual combining song, body-painting, and dance. It is the manner with which Glover renders the Aboriginal figures that is compelling and baffling. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan and, in his wake, Slavoj Žižek, Broadfoot suggests that the dancers become figures where “emergence and loss coincide,” an instability that he sees as portending much of Australian art to follow.“Echoes of Belonging: Navigating Diaspora and Identity in Indian Poetry,” by Monali Chatterjee, examines the work of diasporic Indian poets Keki N. Daruwalla, Jayanta Mahapatra, Nissim Ezekiel, Imtiaz Dharker, and Agha Shahid Ali, and their common preoccupations of alienation, yearning, memory, and nostalgia. These poets, Chatterjee observes, afford valuable insights into “the significance of diaspora in Indian popular culture,” both within and outside of India proper. A central issue is translation and bilingualism, with their residues of colonialism. Chatterjee concludes that “Indian poetry in English serves as a transformational vehicle for reinventing the Indian diaspora by delving deeply into the interconnected issues of migration, cultural displacement, and identity negotiation.”Also concerned with cultural hybridity, Ke Yang and Tat Sun Hau’s article on online and offline cosplaying in Hong Kong looks at the phenomenon and its rising popularity in recent decades. Cosplay is a practice that originated not in one culture but as the cross-pollination of two, namely the United States and Japan—an important detail in this instance, given Hong Kong’s embrace of its own cross-cultural affinities, despite attempts to repress them. Yang and Hau find that cosplaying has a nuanced and multivalent role to play in adolescent identity formation, fostering local and virtual communities and providing a platform for play, while also opening avenues for critique and debate. As with all online communities, the cosplay communities are imperfect and subject to abuse, and yet the positives are also worth enumerating. Cosplay is a contemporary incarnation of masque and carnival, and it is an established fact that dress-up and role-play are lubricants to expression and inventiveness. “Through cosplay,” Yang and Hau conclude, “participants encountered novelty, complexity, and challenges that fostered self-understanding and resilience.” While masking and anonymity online can prompt negativity and abuse, when used ethically, they are significant ways of shaping character and testing belief.This issue also contains three reviews, evaluating an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, a staging of Twelfth Night, and a book about hook-up culture, queer identity, and smartphones. Seen together, these articles and reviews bear witness to the expanding nature of popular culture and its imponderably broad reach.It is also worth noting that this issue sees this journal at the end of its tenth year. Looking back at the many issues and essays we have hosted, it is with great pride that we can say that it is a journal that is truly heterogeneous and inclusive, resistant to the strictures of dogma or ideology. May this commitment continue.