Marshall McLuhan’s provocative dictum, “the medium is the message,” drew scholarly attention to the productive and even determinative functions of media in shaping social and epistemic realities. This insight is especially salient in historical moments when media proliferation and technological shifts intensify ideological encounters, cultural flows, and identity formation. Focusing on East Asia, and drawing on a wide range of modern media forms, this panel approaches media not as neutral conduits or transparent representations of existing cultural worlds, but as active agents in the co-production of new relations, knowledge systems, identities, and, more importantly, national and global imaginaries from the modern period to the present.     

We invite papers that theorize mediation as a generative process rather than a transparent channel of transmission. One focus of this panel is, as Bruno Latour would have it,  mediation as a movement rather than a specific form of representation, where "associations" are made. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- The role of media in forging ethnic, national, and cultural communities in East Asia;

- Transcultural circulations of Asian literary, theatrical, visual texts, and materials;

- Case studies of translation and adaptation across literary, cultural, and political spheres;

- Media  as contested arenas of self-narration and identity construction;

- Digital re-mediations of objects across state, diaspora, and transnational networks. 

While the panel centers on East Asia, we welcome contributions from any period or region of Asia, as well as comparative frameworks that place Asian materials in dialogue with broader questions of cultural production and exchange. We are particularly interested in scholarship that traces how media forms migrate across linguistic, geographic, and institutional borders, and how such movements generate new configurations of identity, memory, and sociality.