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Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan

Sherry D. Fowler

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines ... More

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines the development of sculptures, paintings, and prints associated with the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained strong until its transition, beginning in sixteenth century, to the still active Thirty-Three Kannon cult. The complete set of Six Kannon made in 1224 and housed at the Kyoto temple Daihōonji is an exemplar of the cult’s images. With a diachronic approach, beginning in the eleventh century, individual case studies are employed to reinstate a context for the sets of Six Kannon, the majority of which have been lost or scattered, in order to clarify the former vibrancy, magnitude, and distribution of the cult and enhance knowledge of religious image-making in Japan. While Kannon’s role of assisting beings trapped in the six paths of transmigration is a well-documented catalyst for the selection of six, there are other significant themes at work. Six Kannon worship includes worldly concerns like childbirth and animal husbandry, strong ties between text and image, and numerous cases of matching with Shinto kami groups of six.Less

Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the ... More

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. The book argues that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. The seven in-depth studies include a diverse array of forms (cinematic adaptation of literature, literary adaptation of film, auto-adaptation, and non-narrative adaptation) and a variety of genres (martial arts, melodrama, romance, autobiography, documentary drama). Complementing this formal diversity is a geographical range that far exceeds the cultural, linguistic, and physical boundaries of China. The directors represented here also work in the United States and Europe and reflect the growing international resources of Chinese-language cinema.Less

The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire

Christopher P. Hanscom and Dennis Washburn (eds)

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that ... More

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that demonstrate how race becomes visible or audible in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. From travelogues and records of speech to photographs, radio, plastic surgery, tattoos, postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks, these explorations of diverse media demonstrate the links between the apprehension of racial difference, the formation of social and political hierarchies, and the experience of everyday culture under an expanding bio-political realm of imperial sovereignty. By demonstrating the ways in which the politics of inclusion and exclusion worked through explicitly racialized modes of representation, this collection sheds light on affective strategies common to the creation and maintenance of subjectivity across imperial formations. It also resituates theoretical and historical discussions of race and empire within an East Asian context, complicating the history of this region in provocative ways.Less

After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta

Abidin Kusno

This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the ... More

This book explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era's neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, the book deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured. The book examines the anxiety over the destiny of Jakarta in its efforts to resolve the crisis of the city. The first group of chapters consider the fate and fortune of two building types, namely the city hall and the shop house, over a longue duree as a metonymy for the culture, politics, and society of the city and the nation. Other chapters focus on the intellectual legacies of the Sukarno and Suharto eras and the influence of their spatial paradigms. The final three chapters look at social and ecological consciousness in the post-Suharto era.Less

Ainu Spirits Singing: The Living World of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu

Sarah M. Strong

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for ... More

Indigenous peoples throughout the globe are custodians of a unique, priceless, and increasingly imperiled legacy of oral lore. Among them the Ainu, a people native to northeastern Asia, stand out for the exceptional scope and richness of their oral performance traditions. This book provides a study and English translation of Chiri Yukie's Ainu Shin'yoshu, the first written transcription of Ainu oral narratives by an ethnic Ainu. The thirteen narratives in Chiri's collection belong to the genre known as kamuiyukar, said to be the most ancient performance form in the vast Ainu repertoire. In it, animals (and sometimes plants or other natural phenomena) assume the role of narrator and tell stories about themselves. Along with critical contextual information about traditional Ainu society and its cultural assumptions, the book brings forward pertinent information on the geography and natural history of the coastal southwestern Hokkaido region where the stories were originally performed. It also offers the first extended biography of Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) in English. The story of her life, and her untimely death at age nineteen, makes clear the harsh consequences for Chiri and her fellow Ainu of the Japanese colonization of Hokkaido and the Meiji and Taisho governments' policies of assimilation. Chiri's receipt of the narratives in the Horobetsu dialect from her grandmother and aunt (both traditional performers) and the fact that no native speakers of that dialect survive today make her work all the more significant. The book concludes with a full, integral translation of the text.Less

The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

Leith Morton

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by ... More

Readers worldwide have long been drawn to the foreign, the exotic, and the alien, even before Freud's famous essay on the uncanny in 1919. Given Japan's many years of relative isolation, followed by its multicultural empire, these themes seem ripe for exploration and exploitation by Japanese writers. Their literary adventures have taken them inside Japan as well as outside, and how they internalized the exotic through the adoption of modernist techniques and subject matter forms the primary subject of this book. This is the first book-length thematic study in English of the alien in modern Japanese literature and helps shed new light on a number of important authors. It examines the Gothic, a form of writing with strong affinities to European Gothic and a motif in the fiction of several key modern Japanese writers, such as Arishima Takeo. It also discusses the translations of Tsubouchi Shöyö, Japan's most famous early translator of Shakespeare, and how this author was absorbed into the Japanese literary and theatrical tradition. The new field of translation theory and how it relates to translating Shakespeare are also discussed. The book devotes two chapters to the celebrated female poet Yosano Akiko, whose verse on childbirth and her unborn children broke taboos relating to the expression of the female body and sensibility. It also highlights the writing of contemporary Okinawan novelist Öshiro Tatsuhiro, whose work springs from what is for Japanese an exotic subtropical landscape and makes symbolic reference to the otherness at the heart of Japanese religiosity. The final chapter analyzes the travel writing of Murakami Haruki.Less

The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Kirsten Cather

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. This book traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line ... More

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. This book traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafū to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Ōshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience. The book draws on diverse sources, including trial transcripts and verdicts, literary and film theory, legal scholarship, and surrounding debates in artistic journals and the press. It demonstrates how legal arguments are enmeshed in a broader web of cultural forces. The book offers an original, interdisciplinary analysis that shows how art and law nurtured one another even as they clashed and demonstrates the dynamic relationship between culture and law, society and politics in postwar Japan.Less

Asian Traditions of Meditation

Halvor Eifring (ed.)

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of ... More

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin.Less

The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan

Michael Baskett

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would ... More

Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate the Japanese film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country's film culture developed in lockstep with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture's sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. This book is an examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. It traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semi-colonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. The book provides close readings of individual films and analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. It highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the “hearts and minds” of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan's attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.Less

Back from the Dead: Wrongful Convictions and Criminal Justice in China

He Jiahong

Through highlighting and telling the story of some real cases of wrongful conviction, this book introduces the present situation in the Chinese criminal justice system, and makes deep analysis of its ... More

Through highlighting and telling the story of some real cases of wrongful conviction, this book introduces the present situation in the Chinese criminal justice system, and makes deep analysis of its problems and loopholes. Enlivened with a literary style, it is a treatise of critical legal study. Based on the case analysis and the empirical studies, the author summarizes the causes for wrongful convictions and analyzes the ten misleading zones that most affect this outcome. The author also provides update information about the changes and reforms as well as challenges of the criminal justice in China.Less

Beyond Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives

Mark J. Hudson, Ann-Elise Lewallen, and Mark K. Watson (eds)

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it ... More

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signaled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial mindset of abject academic practices, Ainu Studies was an umbrella term for an approach that claimed scientific authority vis-à-vis Ainu, who became its research objects. As a result of this legacy, a latent sense of suspicion still hangs over the purposes and intentions of non-Ainu researchers. This book seeks to re-address the role of academic scholarship in Ainu social, cultural, and political affairs. Placing Ainu firmly into current debates over Indigeneity, the book provides a broad yet critical overview of the history and current status of Ainu research. With chapters from scholars as well as Ainu activists and artists, it addresses a range of topics including history, ethnography, linguistics, tourism, legal mobilization, hunter-gatherer studies, the Ainu diaspora, gender, and clothwork. The book aims to reframe the question of Ainu research in light of political reforms that are transforming Ainu society today.Less

Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand

Jim Glassman

Transnational economic integration has been described as an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic ... More

Transnational economic integration has been described as an opportunity for all participants to achieve greater prosperity through a combination of political cooperation and capitalist economic competition. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has championed such rhetoric in promoting the integration of China, Southeast Asia's formerly socialist states, and Thailand into a regional project called the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). But while the GMS project is in fact hastening regional economic integration, the book shows that the approach belies the ADB's idealized description of “win-win” outcomes. The process of “actually existing globalization” in the GMS does provide varied opportunities for different actors, but it is less a rising tide that lifts all boats than an uneven flood of transnational capitalist development whose outcomes are determined by intense class struggles, market competition, and regulatory battles. The book makes the case for adopting a class-based approach to analysis of GMS development, regionalization, and actually existing globalization. First it analyzes the interests and actions of various Thai participants in GMS development, then the roles of different Chinese actors in GMS integration. It provides two cases illustrating the serious limits of any notion that GMS integration is a relatively egalitarian process—Laos' participation in GMS development and the role of migrant Burmese workers in the production of the GMS. The final chapter blends geographical-historical analysis with an assessment of uneven development and actually existing globalization in the GMS.Less

The Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Japan: Honor, Vengeance, and Love in Four Plays of the 18th and 19th Centuries

The plays presented here were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, ... More

The plays presented here were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, several important puppet plays were created that went on to become standards in both the Bunraku and Kabuki repertoires; three of which are in this book. Only a handful of complete and uncut plays are produced in Bunraku or Kabuki nowadays; included here is one. Two among the four plays in this book are examples of the much more common practice of staging a single popular act or scene from a much longer drama that itself is seldom, if ever, performed in its entirety today. Kabuki, while better known outside Japan, has been a great beneficiary of the puppet theatre, borrowing perhaps as much as half of its body of work from Bunraku dramas. Bunraku, in turn, has raided the Kabuki repertoire but to a far more modest degree. The final play in this book is an instance of this uncommon reverse borrowing. Moreover, it is an example of another way in which some plays have come to be presented: a coherent subplot of a longer work that gained an independent theatrical existence while its parent drama has since disappeared from the stage. Newly translated and illustrated for the general reader and the specialist, the plays in this book are accompanied by introductions, notes on stage action, and discussions of the various changes that Bunraku underwent.Less

Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Chinese Avant-garde Art and Independent Cinema

Xiaoping Lin

This book affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It situates selected artworks and films in the ... More

This book affords a deep study of Chinese avant-garde art and independent cinema from the mid-1990s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It situates selected artworks and films in the context of Chinese nationalism and post-socialism and against the background of the capitalist globalization that has so radically affected contemporary China. The book juxtaposes and compares artists and independent filmmakers from a number of intertwined perspectives, particularly in their shared avant-garde postures and perceptions. It provides close readings of a variety of visual texts and artistic practices, including installation, performance, painting, photography, video, and film. Throughout it sustains a theoretical discussion of representative artworks and films and succeeds in delineating a variegated postsocialist cultural landscape saturated by market forces, confused values, and lost faith. The book tackles both Chinese art and cinema rigorously within a shared discursive space. It conceptualizes a central thematic concern in both genres as “postsocialist trauma” aggravated by capitalist globalization. The book brings about a dialogue between the narrow field of traditional art history and visual studies more generally.Less

The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition

Zehou Li

The author has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he published works on Emmanuel Kant and ... More

The author has been an influential thinker in China since the 1950s. Before moving to the United States in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he published works on Emmanuel Kant and traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy. This book, a translation of his Huaxia meixue (1989), is considered among the author's most significant works. Apart from its value as an introduction to the philosophy of one of contemporary China's foremost intellectuals, the book fills an important gap in the literature of Chinese aesthetics in English. It presents the author's synthesis of the entire trajectory of Chinese aesthetic thought, from ancient times to the early modern period. The book touches on all areas of artistic activity, including poetry, painting, calligraphy, architecture, and the “art of living.” Right government, the ideal human being, and the path to spiritual transcendence all come under the provenance of aesthetic thought. According to the author this was the case from early Confucian explanations of poetry as that which gives expression to intent, through Zhuangzi's artistic depictions of the ideal personality who discerns the natural way of things and lives according to it, to Chan Buddhist-inspired notions that nature and words can come together to yield insight and enlightenment. This book demonstrates conclusively the fundamental role of aesthetics in the development of the cultural and psychological structures in Chinese culture that define “humanity.”Less

Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China

Yingjin Zhang

This book proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema ... More

This book proposes “polylocality” as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, the book calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism. It begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China's urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent “reel” contact with polylocality in hinterland China. The fifth chapter explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics.Less

Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond

Vera Schwarcz

Drawing upon classical sources in Hebrew and Chinese (as well as some in Greek and Japanese) Colors of Veracity sets out to expand the “lexicon” for veracity in our time. With poetic attentiveness to ... More

Drawing upon classical sources in Hebrew and Chinese (as well as some in Greek and Japanese) Colors of Veracity sets out to expand the “lexicon” for veracity in our time. With poetic attentiveness to connotations and nuance is manifest throughout the book, which redefines both the Jewish understanding of emet (a notion of “truth” that encompasses authenticity) as well as the Chinese commitment to zhen (a vision of the “real” that includes innermost sincerity of the heart-mind in the seeker for veracity). By focusing on the dilemmas of moral conscience embodied by dissidents such as Liu Binyan, Liu Xiaobo and Vaclav Havel, the book illustrates the courage it takes to pursue veracity out of an inner conviction that truth matters, even if it cannot be mapped in its totality. Veracity is shown again and again to be neither black nor white. No vivid colors such as the red of the Chinese Communist Party (with its official propaganda journal entitled “Seek Truth”) suffice in painting its parameters. Instead, what emerges is a vision of “fractured luminosity” which inspires and sustains the moral conviction of those who pursue truth against all odds, including the inner obstacles of prejudice and self-deceit.Less

Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres

Catherine Diamond

Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, looking at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, this book shows ... More

Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, looking at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, this book shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. The book examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works are being presented for local audiences. It places performances in their historical and cultural contexts and also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious movements of the last two decades. Each chapter addresses theatre in a different country and highlights performances exhibiting the unique conditions and concerns of a particular place and time. Most performances revolve in some manner around “contemporary modernity,” questioning what it means—for good or ill—to be a part of the globalized world. Chapters are grouped by three general and overlapping themes. The first is characterized by the increased participation of women in the performing arts. The second is concerned with the effects of censorship on theatre production. A third is distinguished by a focus on nationalism. The book shows the many influences of the past and how the past continues to affect cultural perceptions. It addresses major trends, and underscores how theatre continues to attract new practitioners and reflect the changing aspirations and anxieties of societies in immediate and provocative ways even as it is being marginalized by television, film, and the internet.Less

Compassion and Moral Guidance

Steve Bein

Compassion is a word we use frequently but rarely precisely. One reason we lack a philosophically precise understanding of compassion is that moral philosophers today give it virtually no attention. ... More

Compassion is a word we use frequently but rarely precisely. One reason we lack a philosophically precise understanding of compassion is that moral philosophers today give it virtually no attention. Indeed, in the predominant ethical traditions of the West, compassion tends to be either passed over without remark or explicitly dismissed as irrelevant. And yet in the predominant ethical traditions of Asia, compassion is centrally important. This is clearly the case in Buddhist ethics, and compassion plays a similarly indispensable role in Confucian and Daoist ethics. This book seeks to explain why compassion plays such a substantial role in the moral philosophies of East Asia and an insignificant one in those of Europe and the West. The book opens with detailed surveys of compassion's position in the philosophical works of both traditions. The surveys culminate in an analysis of the conceptions of self and why the differences between these conceptions serve either to celebrate or marginalize the importance of compassion. The book moves on to develop a model for the ethics of compassion, including a chapter on applied ethics seen from the perspective of the ethics of compassion. The result is a new approach to ethics, one that addresses the Rawlsian and Kantian concern for fairness, the utilitarian concern for satisfactory consequences, and the concern in care ethics for the proper treatment of marginalized groups. The book argues that compassion's capacity to address all of these makes it a primary tool for ethical decision-making.Less

Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas: Absent Fathers, Banned Books, and Red Balloons

Michelle E. Bloom

Although cinema has been transnational since its inception, contemporary Sino-French film exemplifies the cinematic hybridity of the contemporary age of globalization. The Sino-French comprises ... More

Although cinema has been transnational since its inception, contemporary Sino-French film exemplifies the cinematic hybridity of the contemporary age of globalization. The Sino-French comprises crossover between the Sinophone and the Francophone. However, Taiwanese and mainland helmed films since 2000 provide the focus here and connect with metropolitan France and more specifically Paris, not the broader French speaking world. Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas calls for the movement away from Orientalism and Occidentalism, myths and stereotypes. Through the tropes of métissage, intertextuality, the makeover, translation and imitation, the Sinophone connects with “Frenchness.” The first three tropes provide optics for examining films by Taiwanese-connected directors Cheng Yu-chieh, Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien in Part I, focused on self-reflexive arthouse work influenced by the French New Wave and other French precursors. Part 2 analyzes Chinese helmed films by Dai Sijie, Emily Tang Xiaobai and Dai Sijie which critique mainland socioeconomics and politics through the portrayal of France. Increasing the national, cultural and linguistic diversity of the Francophone dimension of the Sino-French and calling attention to Sinophone-directed film with French connections expands the scope of Francophone studies and Sinophone Studies, as the Sino-French contributes to transnational film studies.Less