Authors:Hannah Borenstein Abstract: The following analysis draws on social reproduction theory to show how a fan base of amateur athletes who visit Ethiopia contribute to the social and material reproduction of Ethiopian athletics, while simultaneously putting the work of social reproduction onto the athletes. I argue the tourists constitute a larger class of post-industrial white-collar workers that have become mass consumers of exercise and health. Both run for Ethiopia. As the Ethiopian performance of an expected authentic training experience provides conditions of reproduction, the white-collar workers find sights of emotional relief and rejuvenation by feeling charitable and as though they have had an authentic athletic experience. This transnational schema of co-constitutive reproduction serves to make clear how multi-national corporations that form the basis of new forms of consumption can profit, while the work of social reproduction is done by different classes of working people at the same time. PubDate: 2019-12-12 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2019)
Authors:En Li Abstract: This article examines how literature involving games represents immigrants by focusing on the representation of the game mahjong in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club. Providing a new way to read The Joy Luck Club through the window of play, this article also analyzes more broadly how games intersect with immigrant experience in other immigrant literature. Building on but further articulating the intersection between games and immigrants, this article uses three thematic approaches to demonstrate how games contribute to the public narrative of immigration in literature. First, games as an activity to describe immigrant experiences and convey characters. Second, games as a metaphor and a plot-driven device to reflect on immigrant experience. And third, games as an intellectual trend to create dialogue with mainstream culture to negotiate the public narrative of Asian American cultural identities. PubDate: 2019-12-12 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2019)
Authors:Hui Wang Abstract: This essay sets to explore the significance, mode, and complexity of videogame-playing in processes of social reconfiguration and cultural transmutation under conditions of further globalization, digitalization, and multinational capitalism through the online game Lineage in the context of video gaming in East Asia. Growing together with the gaming industry, there are the increased collective zests for the consumption of image, symbolic meaning, sensory spectacles and simulacra, as well as the global enthusiasm for cultural soft power and culturecreative industry. Eventually, these all constitute and transform the political-economic environment of multinational information-capitalism in the so-called post-industrial era, where video gaming is considered an ideal-type commodity and powerful form of cultural statement and participation mechanism. It also expects to shed some light upon the East Asian agencies within this transcultural dynamism, providing a counterargument and third path to those opinions, which consider globalization and contemporary popular culture as either homogeneous techno-oriented pan-Americanization or self-enclosed multiculturalism. PubDate: 2019-12-12 Issue No:Vol. 7 (2019)
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