This volume offers a critical examination of how widening age asymmetries across diverse Asian societies shape the representational economies through which older adults are constructed, mediated, and understood. Foregrounding the intersection of gender and age, it analyses the discursive positioning of older women in multimodal media environments and situates such portrayals within broader configurations of kinship, intergenerational obligation, and socioemotional labour. The essays assembled here draw on textual, visual, and audiovisual materials from China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan to interrogate emergent narratives of ageing and to map shifting cultural, familial, and institutional expectations surrounding later life

By engaging with demographic change, transformations in family structures, and evolving regimes of care, the collection elucidates the rearticulation of filial responsibility, economic dependency, and affective interdependence in rapidly ageing societies. It further considers how contemporary multimedia reframes the experience of decline, loss, and grief, and how these representational practices mediate broader ideological debates about the status, agency, and social value of older adults. Collectively, the contributions provide a theoretically grounded and empirically rich account of the cultural imaginaries through which ageing is negotiated in Asia, highlighting the profound reconfigurations of social relations and life-course expectations unfolding across the region.

Examines local, regional, and global changing representations of ageing in Asian contexts now and the future Unpacks representations of older adults from Asian and intercultural perspectives Explores the links between text, film and media in depictions of older adults and ageing in Asia

Autorentext

Bernard Wilson teaches at Gakushuin University in Tokyo, Japan and specialises in children’s literature and cinema, postcolonialism, and East/West theory. He is widely published in these areas, and his work has appeared in leading international journals and book collections throughout the world. He is the co-editor of The Asian Family in Literature and Film Volumes I and II (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film: Beyond East and West (Routledge, 2021); and Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National and Transnational Trajectories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Sung-Ae Lee is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research areas range across Asian cinema, adaptation studies, trauma studies, Korean diaspora, and Korean literature, film and TV drama. She is the author of 40 book chapters and journal articles. Her recent publications include “Past in the present: film and TV drama, Korean families, and the palimpsestic Neo-Confucian family schema” (in The Asian Family in Literature and Film: Changing Perceptions in a New Age - East Asia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and “Coming-of-age in South Korean Cinema” (in The Oxford Handbook of Children's Film, OUP, 2022).

Inhalt

1. The Age of Age: Practical and Ethical Considerations and Challenges Confronting an Older Asia (Part Two) - Sung-Ae Lee and Bernard Wilson.- Part 1. The Ageing Family.- 2. Still Here: Ageing and the Politics of Refusal in Partition Fiction - Ira Raja.- 3. Old Fathers and (Un)caring Daughters: Narratives of Father-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Japanese Literature and Film - Letizia Guarini.- 4. The Female Body as Archive: Ageing, Care, and Neoliberalism in Ann Hui's A Simple Life - Qiao Li.- Part 2. From the Mouths of Children.- 5. Depictions of Older Adults in Post-2020 Japanese and Taiwanese Picturebooks - Cheng-Ting Chang.- 6. Who Tells the Story of Ageing? Three Institutional Narratives of Older Adults in Indonesian Children's Literature - Herdiana Hakim.- Part 3. All That is Old is New.- 7. Becoming Young Again: Disrupting the Biopolitics of Ageing in Miss Granny and The Light in Your Eyes - Hee-seung Irene Lee.- 8. Narratives of Loss and Care: Reading Indian Advertisements through Spousal Bereavement and Generational Support - Debashrita Dey and Priyanka Tripathi.- 9. Deconstructing the Fatalism of Ageing: Love Never Ends and the Reconstruction of Older Adult Subjectivity in Chinese Cinema - Zou Ping.- Part 4. From Beyond the Grave.- 10. Figures of Death in Independent Chinese Documentaries - Charles Andrew Laughlin.- 11. Digital Resurrection in Ageing East Asia: Thanatechnologies as Cultural Sovereignty in China and Japan - Cringuta Irina Pelea.