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| Anna Chen's poetry and politics at TikTok |
Culture and politics converge in Anna Chen’s video surge
I’m delighted to announce I’m adding more videos to my long form writing as found extensively on this website. I’ll be spreading the love to TikTok and YouTube.
My TikTok page got off to a promising start with POE, my funny poem about Edgar Allan Poe, garnering 218K likes in a week. Oh, now 219.3K. Yup, who knew the dark story-lord had so many fans? I’m going to keep this up. It’s not like I’m short of material, heh! Please bookmark the pages and follow.
Political and cultural commentary feature as it’s my contention that they are not separate but inextricably linked in service to power. It’s just that the West is so much better at it. That’s not a surprise considering that the US poured so much money into its cultural domination wars.
Culture wars always and everywhere
For example, spearheading the international art world with its wave of modern art. Francis Stonor Saunders explains this brilliantly in her book, Who Pays the Piper? I bought this when it was published around 2000, having been told about this corner of the culture war as a yoot by British artist and critic Patrick Heron in my home-from-home in St Ives, Cornwall.
Hollywood is well known as operating as the main arm of the US propaganda machine with many books and articles now available about the role of the CIA and the Office of Strategic Affairs in its movies. Whoah! Did you know that Hollywood suppressed the Weinstein revelations under the influence of Certain Parties?
One reason America is so good at concealing its mass manipulation is that it’s had decades of practise in its advertising industry. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders is the classic text on this subject.
America has an army of psychologists with nothing better to do than researching new and more effective ways to twist your melon completely out of shape. This has added to the the already existing Yellow Peril tropes embedded deeply in Western culture ever since the 19th century Opium Wars and the eight-nation alliance of murderous bandit powers that maimed and pillaged China for a hundred years.
I’ve been investigating this geopolitical friction from Empire for 30 years, ever since I took Suzy Wrong – Human Cannon to the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1994 — a first for a Chinese Brit. See my various writings on this such as Yellowface: the erasure of a race, Sinophobia and the political roots of racism, and A Permanent Reservoir of Scapegoats and many more.
Poetry videos and radio series
In addition to my culture and poetry videos, and having the perfect face for radio, I’m going to be uploading 16 episodes of my pioneering ResonanceFM series from 2013 and 2014, Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge. I’m aiming to get these up on YouTube and at this website over the rest of the year. So do have a listen to what someone straddling two major cultures since birth has to say about them.
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| Boomers poem at TikTok |
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| The Diss Persists poem at TikTok |
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