UCLA

This dissertation is a historical and speculative study of the media, cultural, andtechnological infrastructures that anticipated and accompanied the staging of the Olympic Games in Tokyo (1964, 2020) and Beijing (2008, 2022). Combining comparative and synthetic perspectives, the project examines the Olympic Games as a vehicle of “soft power” diplomacy within global and regional Asian geopolitics from the Cold War to the present, using the concept of the “infrastructural event” as a corollary to and reworking of the familiar media studies notion of the “media event.” Building on existing analyses that primarily treat the Olympic Games and other large-scale broadcasting spectacles textually dramaturgically, this reconsideration centers the long- and short-term technical and aesthetic transformations emblematic of the Olympic preparation process. Through an infrastructural approach bringing together objects of study including undersea cables, railways, urban arts districts, and airports, this project argues that plans to bring the Olympics to Asia are not simply or principally motivated and rationalized by the desire to assert economic and symbolic parity with the west, as scholarship on the subject has often suggested. Rather, through case studies of infrastructural and symbolic linkages between Tokyo and Beijing, this project shows how the inauguration of Asian cities as “Olympic cities” also contributes to broader regional efforts to generate affective ties, mobility, and profitable exchange across Asian borders despite past and intermittent geopolitical antipathies.