Introduction: Creative labour in East Asia

Abstract

In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.

Producing Nollywood portal films: Navigating precarity through informal social relations and hope

“…Many of these creative ways of approaching precarity are contingent on the historical and socio-economic contexts of a specific industry. For instance, Western scholars theorize precarity in creative industries as the fallout of neoliberal principles of deregulation associated with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations (Curtin and Sanson, 2017; de Kloet et al, 2020; Hammer and Ness, 2021; Mayer, 2016). The situation is, however, different in China, where precarity is linked to strict government regulations instead of Western-oriented neoliberal logics (Lin, 2019).…”

“…In their ex-centric approach to theorizing informality, Alacovska and Gill (2019) call for an expansion of creative labour studies to marginal contexts where informality might be a norm rather than an exception. Other scholars have also made a compelling case for the de-Westernization or provincialization of creative labour studies to ensure more inclusive scholarship (de Kloet et al, 2020; Lin, 2019). The common perspective is that, for creative labour studies to truly reflect a global scope, the field must internationalize by engaging with contextual dynamics of diverse media industries in ways that are meaningful, complex, and layered (Lin, 2019; Willems, 2014).…”

“…Precarity is a common condition in screen media industries (Curtin and Sanson, 2016; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011). However, industry responses to precarity in different contexts are usually tempered by distinctive historical, political, economic, and social phenomena (de Kloet et al, 2020). In this article, I analyse the conditions, logics, and practices that characterize precarious and informal labour relations in Nollywood portal film productions.…”

Work Faster, Harder, Cheaper? Global, Local and Sectoral Co-Configurations of Job Insecurities Among Hong Kong Creative Workers

“…Responding to calls for an ‘ex-centric’ theorisation of creative labour outside of the Anglo-American orbit (Alacovska and Gill, 2019; De Kloet et al, 2020), this article focuses on creative work in a particular non-Western context, offering nuanced theoretical and empirical significance. Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011) published a seminal investigation into the conditions of pay, working hours, unionisation, networking, socialising, insecurity and uncertainty in three specific creative industries in Britain: television, magazines and music.…”

Loving the enemy app: Resistance versus professionalism in ‘post-TikTok’ India

“…A study of the popular Chinese app and its ban thus remains related to understandings of localisation of technology, linked to the aspirations of gender, caste, class and sexuality (Punathambekar & Mohan, 2019). This paper thus attempts to ‘globalise’, if not ‘decolonise’, the notion of creativity from exclusive Euro-American neoliberal understandings (Kloet, Lin, & Chow, 2020). Creativity, which translates to ‘everyday cultural production’ (Burgess, 2006) of digital publics, remains significant for exhaustive understanding of digital platforms.…”