Trans-regional Circulation of Jackie Chan's Image in the Late Cold War Years' East Asia

How to view the historically and institutionally constructed concept,"East Asia" is a highly political question: is it a troublesome reminder of a "co-prosperity" sphere as coined by Japanese Imperialists? Does it signify a security bloc consolidated by cold war geopolitics? Does it denote a cultural locality based on the essentialized Confucianism? Is it a model region of "modernization," or on the contrary, an imaginary space for an alternative? Acknowledging the fact that the concept carries a complex history, this essay introduces another way of approaching the concept. It describes a cultural geography shaped by the circulation of one popular image. Through this phenomenological cartography, I hope to trace the sociopolitical transformations of the region in the 1980s. The horizontal cut of 1980s' East Asia can reveal the complex historical layers and "archaeologies of the future," borrowing Fredric Jameson's expression (Jameson, 2002: 215; Jameson, 2005).