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In this essay, the author connects the stereotype of Filipinos as musical mimics to the Philippines's history of colonization by Spain and the United States and argues that in the twenty-first century, Filipino performers are successfully using the Internet to transmediate their imitative skills to the global marketplace. Filipino singers have been periodically discovered and hired by U.S. producers through their YouTube “auditions,” which showed them to be “perfect covers,” that is, artists who can re-perform American popular songs extremely well. The author argues that the international success of Filipino cover artists has helped to raise worldwide awareness of a certain “Filipino brand”—the reputation of Filipinos as excellent mimics not only in entertainment but in call center work, nursing, and domestic labor.

What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, fromBlade RunnertoCloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots.Techno-Orientalisminvestigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection's fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu toFirefly. Applying a variety of theoretical, historical, and interpretive approaches, the contributors consider techno-orientalism a truly global phenomenon. In part, they tackle the key question of how these stereotypes serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia's growing cultural influence and economic dominance. Yet the book also examines artists who have appropriated techno-orientalist tropes in order to critique racist and imperialist attitudes. Techno-Orientalismis the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia. With essays on subjects ranging from wartime rhetoric of race and technology to science fiction by contemporary Asian American writers to the cultural implications of Korean gamers, this volume offers innovative perspectives and broadens conventional discussions in Asian American Cultural studies.

The soap opera, one of U.S. television's longest-running and most influential formats, is on the brink. Declining ratings have been attributed to an increasing number of women working outside the home and to an intensifying competition for viewers' attention from cable and the Internet. Yet, soaps' influence has expanded, with serial narratives becoming commonplace on most prime time TV programs. The Survival of Soap Opera investigates the causes of their dwindling popularity, describes their impact on TV and new media culture, and gleans lessons from their complex history for twenty-first-century media industries.The book contains contributions from established soap scholars such as Robert C. Allen, Louise Spence, Nancy Baym, and Horace Newcomb, along with essays and interviews by emerging scholars, fans and Web site moderators, and soap opera producers, writers, and actors from ABC's General Hospital, CBS's The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful, and other shows. This diverse group of voices seeks to intervene in the discussion about the fate of soap operas at a critical juncture, and speaks to longtime soap viewers, television studies scholars, and media professionals alike.

Black men and queer women invented digital remix culture. In the mid- to late 1980s, Black men developed and popularized digital sampling, a technique of extracting segments from existing recordings and using them to form the musical tracks of hip-hop songs. In the 1990s, queer women founded and populated the first wave of online fan-fiction communities. While many non-Black and nonmale people have made significant contributions to sampling, and nonqueer and nonfemale people have participated heavily in fan production, digital sampling and fan fiction gave rise to the remix culture that has proliferated and thrived on the internet primarily through the creative labor of minority musical and fiction artists. The first digital sampler was invented in 1969,1 but sampling as a production technique began to reach mass audiences in the second half of the 1980s, when groups such as Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, De La Soul, and Run-D.M.C. incorporated as many as \"20 or 30 clips in each song,\"2 with some clips lasting only a few seconds.3 Over the melodies and rhythms constructed from these samples, rappers laid down their rhymes. Sampling introduced the acts of copying, cutting, and mixing to everyday culture, simply by being employed so heavily in the first wave of rap and hip-hop music. The sound of hip-hop consists of sampling plus rapping, and although many cultural critics and fans initially concentrated their attention on the mechanics and impact of MCs rhyming over beats, it was the beats—made of digitally copied and edited samples—that taught millions of people to accept that new, original media texts could result from older texts being chopped up into bits and the bits combined in unexpected ways. Because hip-hop as a genre helped define the cultural zeitgeist of the late 1980s, Black male artists' sampling innovations wove digital remix into popular aesthetic experience. By the time the World Wide Web launched in 1991, hip-hop had already proved that making and sharing remixes were among the most exciting and rich artistic practices that digital media could facilitate. Both official and fan producers issued a plethora of mixes, versions, and edits of films, television series, music recordings, video games, and other media forms that circulated online starting in 1991, but this cycle began with the technological advancements and marketplace triumphs of early hip-hop groups. Margie Borschke argues that \"remix\" is a term that scholars and journalists took up from the music world and applied very broadly to all digital transformations; she warns that \"remix is neither new nor [exclusively] digital.\"4 Following this line of thinking, I assert that sampling can be viewed as the bridge between the audio remix styles that predated the internet and remix as it is widely understood today—that is, as a term that describes a wide range of cultural genres made with \"cut/copy/paste technologies\" and shared online.5 Remix culture was not born on the internet and is not restricted to the internet, but remix culture does thrive on the internet, and it does so largely because sampling-based music enjoyed enormous popularity just before the internet became a publicly available resource.

Fifty Shades began as a fan fiction based on the teen vampire Twilight novels by Stephenie Meyer that James wrote under her fan pseudonym, Snowqueens Icedragon; James removed all references to Twilight's universe and characters from her fan fiction before the text's publication as Fifty Shades.4 Although it originated in the Twilight fan fiction community, Fifty Shades is indeed fan fiction's Sugarhill: it effectuated fan fiction's breakthrough into the general public's consciousness, drawing attention, notoriety, and controversy to the fan fiction genre by virtue of its extraordinary fame, without acknowledging the vast communities and long tradition in which that genre emerged and developed.

[...] an attempt at commercializing fanne already has been made by the company called FanLib, which was largely excoriated by existing fan fiction communities because, as Henry Jenkins wrote, it didn't emerge bottom-up from the fan culture itself. ... Another remix genre, game modding, has also produced professional game designers from its ranks.\\n Altiiough fans have legitimate anxieties about fan fiction being corrupted or deformed by its entry into the commercial sphere, I argue that there is far greater danger of this happening if fan fiction is not commodified by its own producers, but by parties foreign to fandom who do not understand why or for whom the genre works, and who will promote it for purposes it is unsuited for, ignoring the aspects that make it attractive and dear to its readers.

Techno-Orientalist cinema is an “mnemotechnics,” or “memory technology,” of U.S.-Asian relations. I regard techno-Orientalist films as texts that have recorded and transmitted, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, the multifaceted ways that Americans have perceived and negotiated the deep, complex interconnections of Asia and America. Technologies that communicate memory from generation to generation are technologies of “cultural memory.” Jan Assman states that “cultural memory” comprises memories of events experienced by a community that are “maintained through cultural formation (texts, rites, monuments)” (Assman and Czaplicka 129), such that members of the community who were not alive when