On playfully becoming the ‘Other’

Abstract

The article provides a reception study of an Asian audience’s ethical and political responses to the US talk show, Oprah Winfrey. The programme’s western prescriptions of practical and principled conduct are discussed by viewers of Chinese, Indian and Malay ethnicity living in Malaysia (a country in continual competition with Singapore for the honourable title of Asia’s most digitally developed and diasporic nation). But the study of particular reception processes is never far from broader methodological issues. Epistemological anxieties about academics ‘externally’ mediating and interrogating viewers’ understanding of their reactions to programmes are considered. For ethnography is unavoidably interpretative. The article reflects on a range of audience narrative readings of talk shows to establish the former’s essential or phenomenological core, mapping out four types of response to television travelling across cultures. Foregrounding identification, cognitive conditions of audience empathy with, or dissent from, television’s perspectives on the world are described.