Introduction

In Asia, as in so many other locations outside the US, television was global before it became local. Commencing as it did in the West, and in the Global North, the period of technological advancement that continued with ever-accelerating pace from the mid-1950s onwards often ran slightly ahead of the emergence of politically independent nation-states in Asia. That is especially true for postcolonial countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines – even, as Divya McMillin argues in this collection, for India – as well as for a nation-state such as Taiwan as it has struggled to construct a distinctly Taiwanese national identity. In Singapore, Jinna Tay watched the same programmes as she was growing up as did her contemporaries in Australia where she now works: Little House on the Prairie and Hawaii Five-O. The generation before her watched Doctor Who, I Dream of Jeannie, and so on. These Western texts would have made their rounds across many Asian television screens as national television systems began the cultural, political and industrial process of establishing their relation to their national audiences. As Umi Khattab’s chapter on Malaysia in this volume argues, even the definition of these audiences as ‘national’ has often proven to be a long, highly contested and difficult process. This is evident at the most fundamental levels: for instance, before the creation of an independent nation-state, or in some cases before the establishment of an official ‘national language’ in multiethnic societies such Singapore, local dialects were often used in early broadcasting – and in some cases now (India, for example), they still are. As we shall see time and again in the national case studies collected in this book, the particular relation between the local and the national, the regional and the global, the indigenous and the imported, is the highly specific product of particular historical conditions and contingencies. The investigation of these conditions and contingencies in each of our locations is what this book sets out to provide – a nuanced and complicated understanding of the histories of television in Asia, across localities, states and the region.