Through ethnographic and media analyses, this book examines the affective dimensions of power in East Asia, in order to illuminate the dynamics of contemporary governance, and to overcome common Western assumptions about East Asian governmentality. In turn, it provides a framework for analyzing emerging phenomena in East Asia, such as the psychologization of social problems, the rise of self-help genres, transnational labor migration, new ideologies of gender and the family, and mass-mediated affective communities.

Foreword, Sara Ahmed Part I: Introduction The Politics of Affect and Emotion: Imagination, Potentiality and Anticipation in East Asia, Jie Yang Part II: Happiness and Psychologization 1. Crafting Confucian Remedies for Happiness in Contemporary China: Unraveling the Yu Dan Phenomenon, Yanhua Zhang 2. The Happiness of the Marginalized: Counseling and Self-Reflexivity in China, Jie Yang Part III: Body, Affect, and Subjectivity 3. Banking in Affects: The Child, a Landscape, and the Performance of a Canonical View, Teresa Kuan 4. Hospitality and Detachment: Japanese Tour Guides' Affective Labor in Canada, Shiho Satsuka Part IV: Tears, Media, and Affective Articulation 5. Tears, Capital, Ethics: Television and Public Sphere in Japan, Daniel White 6. Crying Your Heart Out: The Televisual Construction of "Female Laid-Off Workers" and Melodramatic Salvation in the Age of Market Economy, Shuyu Kong Part V: Gender, Affective Labor, and Biopolitical Economy 7. "Affective Foreigners Save our Elder Citizens": Media Discourse of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Japan, Ayaka Yoshimizu 8. Fulfilling the Self and Transnational Intimacy through Emotional Labor: The Experiences of Migrant Filipino Domestic Workers in South Korea, Toshiko Tsujimoto Part VI: Affect, Modernity, and Empires 9. Affective Attachments to Japanese Women's Language: Language, Gender, and Emotion in Colonialism, Momoko Nakamura 10. The Politics of Haan: Affect and the Domestication of Anger in South Korea, Sung Kil Min 11. Familial Communism and Cartoons: An Affective Political Economy of North Korea, Craig MacKie