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Singers Katy Perry and Avril Lavigne are among the most recent White women performers to appropriate Japanese femininity. In Perry's November 2013 performance of 'Unconditionally,' she used Orientalist imagery of premodern Japan, and in Lavigne's 2014 single 'Hello Kitty,' she used techno-Orientalist imagery of Harajuku street fashion, kawaii, and Japanese-as-cyborg. I argue that like White women performers, who performed Japanese femininity in the turn of the 20th century, Perry and Lavigne caricatured Japanese femininity as a hybrid costume to advance their own subjectivities. Yet, I also show through deconstructive criticism that their spectacular use of juxtaposition and excess creates 'obtuse meanings' in which subversive meanings escape and opportunistically challenge the dominant meaning of the texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues three propositions. The first is that restorative justice should be a legal principle that can trump legal rules, such as sentencing rules. Second it argues for embedding restorative justice in a hybrid political philosophy that is republican-feminist-socialist-capitalist. Third, it goes beyond ‘Persia to China: the Silk Road of Restorative Justice I’, that identified incipient examples of this hybridity from Iran to China, to advance a normative account of hybridity. Travelling the Silk Road is a metaphor for the comparative method required of reformers who seek better governance through hybrid governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the sociocultural implications of Korean popular music (K-pop) idol group Girls' Generation's (SNSD's) debut on Late Show With David Letterman, this article discusses how the debut warrants a critical examination on K-pop's global popularity. Investigating critically how the current literature on K-pop's success focuses on cultural hybridity, this article maintains that SNSD's debut clarifies how K-pop's hybridity does not mean dialectical interactions between American form and Korean content. Furthermore, this article argues that cultural hegemony as a constitutive result of sociohistorical and politicoeconomic arrangements provides a better heuristic tool, and K-pop should be understood as a part of the hegemony of American pop and neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses hybridity of media and cultural and aesthetic exchange between the West and East Asia. Anime series Afro Samurai (2007) and Aaron McGruder's animated series the Boondocks (2005) is the example of the blend of the Japanese-style animation and intertextuality. Phenomenon of transnational media exchange and consumption illustrates known as “pop cosmopolitanism," as defined by professor Henry Jenkins, is discussed.

This article examines the Japanese pop music genre of visual kei, a genre marked by emphasis on elaborate visual display often involving cross-dressing of male band members. The genre, in addition, employs a variety of musical styles and influences that speaks to an underlying concept of hybridity in the construction of the visual and sonic image of both practitioners and consumers of the genre. In particular this article analyzes the practice of visual kei from the perspective of the bands and their music, fans of the genre and the relationship of visual kei to other forms of Japanese popular culture that involve androgyny and gender slippage. As such this article theorizes the importance of the concept of ‘hybridity’, as developed in postcolonial studies, to illuminate the liminality of recent Japanese cultural identity formation that is promulgated through visual kei. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advances in communication technologies have increased the availability of cultural goods across borders, raising concerns that cultural products from large economies will displace those in smaller economies. This article provides stylised facts about global music consumption and trade since 1960 using a unique data on popular music charts corresponding to over 98% of the global music market. Contrary to growing fears about large-country dominance, our gravity estimates show a substantial bias towards domestic music that has, perhaps surprisingly, increased in the past decade. Moreover, we find no evidence that new communications channels reduce the consumption of domestic music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bonding between black and brown immigrants in Britain has resulted in the emergence of a new musical genre called Bhangra, which hybridises Punjabi dhol rhythms with those of reggae, rap and hip hop. Bhangra's appropriation of Black sounds that are considered ‘Kool’ in the West has not only given Asian youth a new, distinctive voice in the form of ‘Asian dance music’ but has also led to the reinvention of Punjabi folk tradition in consonance with the lived realities of multicultural Britain. This essay examines various aspects of sonic hybridisation in ‘the diaspora space’ by British Asian music producers through tracing the history of Bhangra's ‘douglarisation’, beginning in the 1990s with Apache Indian's experiments with reggae. It covers all forms of mixings that came in between, including active collaborations, rappings, remixings, samplings and so on that made Punjabi and Jamaican patois dialogue in the global popular cultural space. The essay explores the possibilities of a ‘douglas poetics’ for Bhangra by juxtaposing the celebration of sonic douglarisation in postmodern narratives of migrancy and hybridity against the stigmatisation of biological douglarisation in miscegenation theories and ancient Indian pollution taboos. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the practice and recent rise in the use of various aspects of Japanese popular culture in hip hop, particularly as manifest in the work of RZA, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj. Often these references highlight the high-tech, futuristic aesthetic of much Japanese popular culture and thus resonate with concepts and practices surrounding Afro-futurism. Drawing on various theories of hybridity, this article analyses how Japanese popular culture has informed constructions of African American identity. In contrast to the often sensational media coverage of racial tensions between African American and Asian communities, the nexus of Japanese popular culture and African American hip hop evinces a sympathetic connection based on shared notions of Afro-Asian liberation and empowerment achieved, in part, through a common aesthetic of technological mastery and appropriation. The synthesis of Asian popular culture and African American hip hop represents a globally hybridised experience of identity and racial formation in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In China, although “general interest” magazines can be said to have existed during the Maoist and early post-Maoist eras, Western-style magazines that promote a consumerist lifestyle came into being and gained widespread popularity only in the past two decades. Among them, an entire group of titles consists of localised Chinese editions of internationally popular lifestyle magazines. This paper explores the interaction of global trends and influences with local cultures and realities in men's lifestyle magazines published in China. In particular, it discusses the Chinese “variations” of the Western “new man” and “new lad” types of male image. Despite the superficial similarities with Western images, critical readings and quantitative studies of the verbal and visual content of these magazines reveal some distinctive “Chinese” features. As a form of popular culture, the men's lifestyle magazine lends expression to the fantasies, desires and needs of “new rich” men in China. With consumerism and aspirationalism at the centre of its ideological construction, it serves as an interesting site of negotiation between what Lisa Rofel calls the two aspects of “cosmopolitanism with Chinese characteristics” – namely, a self-conscious transcendence of locality and a domestication of cosmopolitanism by way of renegotiating China's place in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper takes the country music song and video “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” as a case study of the deeply ambivalent potentials of hybridity in contemporary culture. “Badonkadonk” was celebrated by some as joining hip hop and country music to create a “hybrid,” a type of cultural text valorized in various intellectual and popular discourses as both embodying and advancing progressive social values such as antiracism and antiemperialism. This essay, however, uses close reading and an account of “Badonkadonk's” context within country music's generic selfconstruction to expose the conflicted nature of the text's hybridity, which includes substantial reactionary and essentialist elements. “Badonkadonk” caters to American culture's growing embrace of hybridity while continuing twentieth century efforts to downplay country music's racially hybrid roots. This instance highlights problems in concepts such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism. This includes the crucial distinction between consciously hybrid works of art or culture, and the less consciously hybrid objects that emerge “naturally” from the mixing of cultures. The rise of selfconsciously hybrid culture and the celebration of hybridity have been partially enabled by contemporary academic theories of hybridity's progressivism. The essay concludes by highlighting some of the strategic and philosophical shortcomings of such selfconscious hybridism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consistent with a sociocritical frame and the analytic tools of hybridity theory, this article explicates how urban fifth-grade children made language hybrids using rap and poetry to participate in classroom literacy. Ethnographic data from a yearlong study illustrate two key findings. First, standards-based and canon-driven writing models maintained literacy and language borders through antihybrid practices based in antipopular ideologies. Second, the children used hybrid rap poems to negotiate and challenge linguistic and ideological constraints that hemmed in classroom literacy. The author suggests that canon-driven writing pedagogies be more inclusive of youth popular cultures and culturally relevant literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last ten years or so, interest among the Japanese in their Korean neighbour has increased significantly. Yet, before the Korean Wave hit Japan in the early 2000s, Kusanagi Tsuyoshi, member of popular Japanese boy-band SMAP, had already debuted and gained popularity as Chonangang, his Korean alter-self. From releasing a Korean pop-music single to interviewing South Korean Presidents on Japanese national television, it is undeniable that Kusanagi (and Chonangang) has brought Korea closer to the hearts of the Japanese. In this paper, I argue that Kusanagi's performances of and as Chonangang create a polyglotic, hybrid identity that functions as a 'third space' through which notions of an underlying, essential Japanese (and Korean) identity can be destabilised. Beyond mere entertainment, Kusanagi's adoption of an identity position that is neither Japanese nor Korean, yet also both Japanese and Korean, enables the articulation of difference and hybridity which, I contend, has direct relevance to Japan-Korea and Japanese-resident Korean relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With attention to the cultural mobility of local and global foodstuffs, this study examines the movement of curry as a product of England's colonization of India. The concept of a curry was developed by the British East India Company while stationed in India. Members of the EIC would describe any saucy Indian dish as a 'curry,' and when these men returned to England, they brought back their desire for Indian food. The movement of curry helped to shape its definition as a colonial product of India incorporated into English cuisine. By tracking curry and curry powder from its inception as an East India Company staple to the cookbooks and kitchens of eighteenth century Britain, this study shows how the distinct locality of curry changed its meaning over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “fictional turn” in translation studies has acknowledged the fact that translators/interpreters have been moved from behind the curtain to center stage. Whether this is a result of poststructuralist or postcolonial scholarship, the fact remains that translators/interpreters now figure as protagonists in film, theater, and especially popular literature. Does this “promotion” reflect a change of status? How are translators portrayed? How is their habitus portrayed? What function do they serve? Has there been a change in their portrayal/function in the last thirty years? Does the change reflect the different approach/es to the “hybrid” in this period? Has the “death of the author” theory and the promotion of translators/interpreters to the status of “authorship” changed their self-image? This essay is an attempt at answering these questions, diachronically and synchronically, with the help of various literary texts from the 1970s on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that transnational ways of seeing help us apprehend the histories of globalization, immigration and imperialism that frame and make legible cultural productions. Focusing on John Cameron Mitchell's 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which has been almost universally received as being about transsexuality, this essay argues that the film is equally about transnationality and specifically about how queer identifications and identities are produced in relation to the nation-state. Hedwig explores the limits of national belonging and the pleasures of US popular culture through the lens of sexual and gender identity, with the ambiguity of the Hedwig's body embodying confusion about legal, political and cultural citizenship. The film identifies and critiques the violences of heteronormative national belonging, yet by reading Hedwig alongside the political and legal histories that make its narrative legible, it becomes apparent that the film's popular reception frequently erases the transnational and imperial histories that undergird and produce sexual identities and identification. I argue that cultural practices do not simply reflect national or queer identifications but also produce them. The fissures between the cultural work of the film itself and of its circulation illustrate how despite the mutual imbrication of sexuality and nationality, transsexuality is sometimes more readily apprehended than is transnationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines multi-language texts in the body of the works of the Mexican Onda movement (1964–1971). The aim of the study is to analyse foreign language inclusions from a transcultural perspective. The inclusions to be considered are words and phrases in foreign languages (used in their original form or in translation), and quotations from contemporary pop and rock songs (both original and in translation). By applying a number of theories, such as hermeneutics, transcultural hybridity, and diasporic writing, the study will determine the purpose of such inclusions as part of a complex linguistic coding used in the Onda works. The system of closed codes created by the Onda may appear elitist because it limits the readership of the texts to those who are knowledgeable enough to understand the hidden meaning of the texts. This study argues that the seemingly elitist nature of the Onda is an attempt at bridging the gap between high (mainstream) and low culture (subculture) by challenging the constraints of cultural dominance. This challenge is based upon the rejection of a canonical high cultural framework and its replacement with a transcultural reference system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents a discussion on the relations between mass media, multilingualism, and social change in a transnational era. Particular attention is paid to the example of the German intercultural radio station known as "Radio MultiKulti" (RM), and the authors examine the challenges the radio station has faced in finding economic support. Further comments are made concerning studies in hybridity and cultural fusion performed by literary scholars Mikhail Bakhtin and Iurii Lotman. The article concludes with comments regarding public responses to the closing of RM in 2008.

Why are bookstore shelves filled with mysteries, horror stories, romances, Westerns and other genre fiction? Why should one spend time reading narratives that are so similar? Why, for that matter, should one write works that are so similar to those of other authors? One philosopher, Noel Carroll, in fact, refers to the phenomenon as the 'paradox of junk fiction'. Are there works in political theory as well that share characteristics with these genres? And is there also a paradox involved among both these readers and authors? This essay reviews both the criticisms and defenses of popular generic texts focusing on arguments that defend the complexity of genre texts and those that deny the distinction between generic works and others. Utopias are identified as counterparts in political theory and are applied to this genre debate. I conclude by revising the genre paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the adaptation process of Haitian immigrants in the U.S. It presents the concept of transnationalism and hybridity that was constructed on foreign soil as a means of adjusting to foreign and harsh reality. It also analyses the process of negotiation of culture and the manifestations of hybridity within the Haitian diaspora. Demographic information of the Haitian immigrants in the U.S. is also presented. Moreover, it also mentions the negative experiences and the conditions of the Black Haitians in the U.S.

The article discusses the social aspects of the music of the band The Nada and its Argentine American singer Kevin Johansen, including in regard to the music's role in the creation of a social space that is referred to as a third space. An overview of languages used within Johansen's music, including its reflecting elements of cultural fusion of his background, is provided.