Sheng-mei Ma on Cultural Bifocals on Chinese TV Series and Diaspora Fiction and China Pop! Pop Culture, Propoganda, and Pacific Pop-Ups
October 24, 2025
“To live is to write,” Sheng-mei Ma explains when asked what keeps him churning out books. Ma, professor of English at Michigan State University, has published five since 2020 and more than a dozen over his career. His two most recent titles––Cultural Bifocals on Chinese TV Series and Diaspora Fiction, published by Routledge in 2025, and China Pop! Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups, published by the Ohio State University Press in 2024––continue his longstanding scholarly project of bridging American studies, Asian studies, and Asian American studies to investigate the role of popular culture in structuring the perception and misperception of China and the Chinese diaspora.
Cultural Bifocals and China Pop! investigate the growing universe of popular culture made for the billion Sinophone consumers in China and overseas and the “seductive art of propaganda” it performs and subverts. Ma, an iconoclastic critic, doesn’t hesitate to call out Asian American artists who perpetuate narrow anti-Asian ideas about Chinese and Chinese immigrants. He describes himself as “a Chinese who has never stayed in China longer than one month in each visit, a Taiwanese who cannot speak the Taiwanese dialect, and an American whom mainstream Americans may view as ‘perennially alien.’” He wears, as the title of his most recent book suggests, cultural bifocals. The contradictions of his own social location inform what he calls his “autotheoretical approach” to cultural studies.
Since completing Cultural Bifocals and China Pop!, Ma has been publishing a series of short articles on Medium. But he can’t stay away from book writing for long. His next, “Chinese Serial: Cannibalizing Classics, Colonial Slaves, Sino-Noir, and Taiwan,” is already under contract with Bloomsbury.
