Popular culture in the time of Greater Nanyang

Cognisant of the multivalent, shifting meanings of “Nanyang” as a spatiotemporal, geopolitical, geo-economic, and cultural unit, this article seeks to flesh out the concept of “Popular Nanyang” by bringing in the contributions of popular culture from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Historically, ethnic Chinese played an important role in the creation of “the popular,” albeit often dismissed as commercial or of low cultural value, in the plurilingual settings of their respective domiciles. Their networked production, distribution, circulation, consumption, and (e)valuation of popular culture helped substantiate the reach and bounds of “Nanyang” as geography, market, and regional imaginary. This article reclaims and repurposes the term “Greater Nanyang” to give weight to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao as hubs for the multi-sited co-creation of the Popular Nanyang from the Cold War era to the end of the twentieth century. The Greater Nanyang concept highlights the historicity, materiality, politics, economies, ecologies, and cultures of localisation, meaning-making, and value creation that underpin place-, identity-, and claim-making in, across, and beyond the region. The temporal depth of Popular Nanyang also raises questions about Sinophone assumptions of the convergence of language, audience, cultural literacy, and ethnicity in the production, circulation, and consumption of popular culture.