You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Hollywood films about Asians and interracial sexuality are the focus of Gina Marchetti's provocative new work. While miscegenation might seem an unlikely theme for Hollywood, Marchetti shows how fantasy-dramas of interracial rape, lynching, tragic love, and model marriage are powerfully evident in American cinema. The author begins with a discussion of D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, then considers later films such as Shanghai Express, Madame Butterfly, and the recurring geisha movies. She also includes some fascinating "forgotten" films that have been overlooked by critics until now. Marchetti brings the theoretical perspective of recent writing on race, ethnicity, and gender to her analyses of film and television and argues persuasively that these media help to perpetuate social and racial inequality in America. Noting how social norms and taboos have been simultaneously set and broken by Hollywood filmmakers, she discusses the "orientalist" tensions underlying the construction of American cultural identity. Her book will be certain to interest readers in film, Asian, women's, and cultural studies.
From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 explores the important interconnections involving questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality on world screens by examining a range of films, videos, and digital works associated with global Chinese culture. The ways in which the world has imagined China and the images the Chinese have used to depict themselves have changed dramatically since 1989. The media spotlight placed on Beijing during the spring of 1989 created repercussions that continue to affect how China is seen globally, how it sees itself, and how the Chinese outside the People's Republic see themselves. The films ...
A provocative, contemporary anthology examining the construction of boys' identity in modern cinema.
Citing China explores the role film plays in creating a common ground for the exchange of political and aesthetic ideas between China and the rest of the world. It does so by examining the depiction of China in contemporary film, looking at how global filmmakers “cite” China on screen. Author Gina Marchetti’s aim is not to point to how China continues to function as a metaphor or allusion that has little to do with the geopolitical actualities of contemporary China. Rather, she highlights China’s position within global film culture, examining how cinematic quotations link current films to past political movements and unresolved social issues in a continuing multidirectional conversat...
The Cosmopolitan Dream presents the broad patterns in the transformations of mainland Chinese masculinity over recent years, covering both representations (in film, fiction, and on television) and the lived experiences of Chinese men on four continents. Exposure to transnational influences has made Chinese notions of masculinity more cosmopolitan than ever before, yet the configurations of these hybrid masculinities retain the imprint of Chinese historical models. With the increasing interconnectivity of markets around the world, the hegemonic mode of manhood is now a highly mobile transnational business form of masculinity. However, the fusion of this kind of cosmopolitanism with Chinese ch...
A look at Chinese filmmaking in the post-1989 American diaspora
Honourable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS Publication Awards 2022 Sheldon Lu's wide-ranging new book investigates how filmmakers and visual artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have envisioned China as it transitions from a socialist to a globalized capitalist state. It examines how the modern nation has been refashioned and re-imagined in order to keep pace with globalization and transnationalism. At the heart of Lu's analysis is a double movement in the relationship between nation and transnationalism in the Chinese post-socialist state. He considers the complexity of how the Chinese economy is integrated in the global capitalist system while also remaining a repressive...
A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema provides the first comprehensive scholarly exploration of this unique global cinema. By embracing the interdisciplinary approach of contemporary film and cultural studies, this collection navigates theoretical debates while charting a new course for future research in Hong Kong film. Examines Hong Kong cinema within an interdisciplinary context, drawing connections between media, gender, and Asian studies, Asian regional studies, Chinese language and cultural studies, global studies, and critical theory Highlights the often contentious debates that shape current thinking about film as a medium and its possible future Investigates how changing research on gende...
Since 1978, the changes brought on by China's reforms have had an inevitable and significant impact on the development of literature, the arts, and the whole spectrum of culture. As well, contemporary Chinese films have reflected this transition towards commercialization and internationalization, which has included constant changes in cultural policies and the economic conditions for film production. The articles in this collection argue that contemporary Chinese films display a profound shift in identity construction. They explore Chinese identities related to class, nation, and gender, and they highlight aspects of individual identity. All of these are marked by contradiction, tension, multiple versions, changes over time, and other evidence of contingency and construction. The book draws attention to uncertain and unpredictable qualities of "Chineseness" which are often torn between past and present, but are also increasingly comprised of local, national, and global elements. (Series: Chinese History and Society / Berliner China-Hefte - Vol. 40)
Manoeuvring around mainland China's censors and pushing back against threats of lawsuits, online harassment, and physical violence, #MeToo activists shed a particularly harsh light on the treatment of women in the cinema and entertainment industries. Focusing on films from the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora, this book considers how female directors shape Chinese visual politics through the depiction of the look, the stare, the leer, the glare, the glimpse, the glance, the queer and the oppositional gaze in fiction and documentary filmmaking. In the years leading up to and following in the wake of #MeToo, these cosmopolitan women filmmakers offer innovative angles on body image, reproduction, romance, family relations, gender identity, generational differences, female sexuality, sexual violence, sex work, labor migration, career options, minority experiences, media access, feminist activism and political rights within the rapidly changing Chinese cultural orbit.