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Amid a global cultural landscape defined both by the ambiguities of deterritorialization and the persistent impact of established geopolitical hierarchies, the idea of cultural reflux offers a potent tool to conceptualize and lend context to the study of nascent peripheral and semiperipheral media industries. Dialoguing with Thussu and Iwabuchi’s work on media flow as well as Curtin’s concept of media capitals, this article proposes to analyze “mockbusters”: derivative copies of established metropolitan media properties. I specifically look at the output of the Brazilian studio Video Brinquedo, infamous in the 2000s for its blatant, low-quality copies of established children’s media properties. In examining the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) mockbuster as a case study of opportunistic media counterflow, the idea of cultural reflux complicates debates over where we should situate our analytical objectives with respect to mediatic peripherality, and how we can more concretely examine the relationship of media flow to transnational imperial frameworks.

This article discusses the portrayal of popular music in comics as both a product of sensory and emotive experience, and as a determinant of social identity and labour. To this end, it focuses on the Japanese serialized manga BECK and the Canadian graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim. These two works offer comparable perspectives on music and the social mythos of musicianship, as well as sharing similar young male protagonists and social contexts, despite their disparate settings in Tokyo and Toronto, respectively. Through a comparative reading of these texts, this analysis examines contemporary comic book techniques as well as the cross-cultural dynamics of Japanese and Anglo-American comic book cultures, specifically with regard to the portrayal of workers in fields of cultural production. In order to examine their interrelated depictions of music as both sensorial experience and enactment of collective identity, I first draw on the canon of comic book semiotics established by Scott McCloud, Ian Hague, and others to examine the techniques employed by these texts in communicating music as an emotive sensorial experience. In particular I will concentrate on their use of diagrammatic techniques and visual caricature as a means of communicating music – not through attempted synaesthetic effects, but rather through emotive evocation. Second, I look at their representation of musicianship as an area in which the mythology of artistic entrepreneurialism coexists with imperatives of collective identity and lifestyle. I examine the sociologically idiosyncratic manner in which these comics reflect and build upon these mythologies through the filters of class, cultural and generational identity, creating narratives that at times perpetuate – and at others subvert – the grand entrepreneurial narratives ascribed to musicianship within contemporary neo-liberal notions of creative labour.

Amid a rapidly growing wave of anti-neoliberal protest emerging in late 2019, Chile’s government scrambled to respond to the massive scale of this dissidence by attempting to find some external agent to pin the blame on. Initially seeking evidence of Venezuelan or Russian involvement, the state eventually pinned the blame on K-pop as an agent of “social rupture.” This article examines this framing of K-pop by Chilean authorities and what this says about the position of Korean media’s integration into a Latin American pop-culture landscape that is growing ever more globalized and non-Western. It likewise examines the contestatory embracing of K-pop by Chilean anti-neoliberal activists, their broader integration of globalized cultural objects, and how this reflects on wider current anti-neoliberal activist cultures operating in the Global South.

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