Dallas, one of the great internationally-screened soap operas, offers us first and foremost entertainment. But what is it about Dallas that makes that entertainment so successful, and how exactly is its entertainment constructed?

Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is mainly produced - the...

Cultural Studies explores popular culture in a uniquely exciting and innovative way. From new kinds of writing to photo essays, the journal is both theoretically and politically rewarding.

This work brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on media audiences to ask what it means to live in a world saturated by media. What does our media audiencehood say about our everyday lives and social relations, and how does it illuminate the condition of contemporary culture?

Living Room Wars brings together Ien Ang's recent writings on television audiences, and, in response to recent criticisms of cultural studies, argues that it is possible to study audience pleasures and popular television in a way that is not naively populist. Ang examines how the makers and marketers of television attempt to mould their audience and looks at the often unexpected ways in which the viewers actively engage with the programmes they watch.
Living Room Wars highlights the inherent contradictions of a politics of pleasure' of television consumption: Ang moves beyond the...

Trajectories brings together cultural theorists not only from countries with a known historical critical tradition such as America, Canada and Australia but from the East-Asia locations of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Philippines, India and Thailand. It constitutes a critical confrontation between the imperial and colonial co-ordinates of north and south, east and west. Without rejecting the Anglo-American practices of cultural studies, the contributors present critical cultural studies as an internationalist and decolonized project. Trajectories links critical...

Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalization and diaspora. The starting point for her discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I...

Leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalization and diaspora. Ang reflects upon tensions between Asia' and the West' at a national and global level, and considers the disparate meanings of Chineseness' in the contemporary world. Ang then turns to the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbors, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of Asia' and...

Millions of people all over the world are avid members of the television audience. Yet, despite the central place television occupies in contemporary culture, our understanding of its complex and dynamic role in everyday life remains surprisingly limited. Focusing on the television audience, Ien Ang asks why we understand so little about its nature, and argues that our ignorance arises directly out of the biases inherent in prevailing official knowledge about it. She sets out to deconstruct the assumptions of this official knowledge by exploring the territory where it is mainly produced - the...