Abstract
Amid a global cultural landscape defined both by the ambiguities of deterritorialization and the persistent impact of established geopolitical hierarchies, the idea of cultural reflux offers a potent tool to conceptualize and lend context to the study of nascent peripheral and semiperipheral media industries. Dialoguing with Thussu and Iwabuchi’s work on media flow as well as Curtin’s concept of media capitals, this article proposes to analyze “mockbusters”: derivative copies of established metropolitan media properties. I specifically look at the output of the Brazilian studio Video Brinquedo, infamous in the 2000s for its blatant, low-quality copies of established children’s media properties. In examining the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) mockbuster as a case study of opportunistic media counterflow, the idea of cultural reflux complicates debates over where we should situate our analytical objectives with respect to mediatic peripherality, and how we can more concretely examine the relationship of media flow to transnational imperial frameworks.
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