Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-first Century

Locating Taiwan Cinema in the Twenty-first Century
Author: Paul Pickowicz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre: Motion pictures
ISBN: 9781638570240

"There has been much discussion of New Wave Taiwan cinema of the 1980s and 1990s, including research that studies the pathbreaking contributions of acclaimed directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien. This book updates the scholarship on Taiwan cinema by taking it into the twenty-first century. It is the first book to take a multidisciplinary approach to evaluating recent Taiwan films. The authors are specialists in cultural studies, history, and the social sciences, and they use different film materials and methodologies to analyze the ways in which filmmakers deal with the evolution of Taiwan's society, economy, and culture in the new century. The emphasis is placed on the diversity of approaches that characterize recent Taiwan cinema. Taiwanese filmmakers use many forms and genres to tackle pressing issues. In sharp contrast to the late-twentieth-century New Wave filmmakers who were widely regarded as producing "art films" that had little impact on the domestic market, many recent Taiwan films have enjoyed huge commercial success in Taiwan. This book probes many crucial controversies: What are Taiwan's meaningful cultural and historical connections to Japan? How do Taiwanese filmmakers and audiences feel about mainland China? How does Taiwan cinema deal with environmental issues, animal rights, human trafficking, sexuality, and the challenges facing ethnic minorities? Locating Twenty-First-Century Taiwan Cinema is an important book for collections in Asian studies, film studies, and the social sciences"--

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema
Author: Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2022-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 047222039X

Thirty-two New Takes on Taiwan Cinema covers thirty-two films from Taiwan, addressing a flowering of new talent, moving from art film to genre pictures, and nonfiction. Beyond the conventional framework of privileging “New and Post-New Cinema,” or prominence of auteurs or single films, this volume is a comprehensive, judicious take on Taiwan cinema that fills gaps in the literature, offers a renewed historiography, and introduces new creative force and voices of Taiwan’s moving image culture to produce a leading and accessible work on Taiwan film and culture. Film-by-film is conceived as the main carrier of moving picture imagery for a majority of viewers, across the world. The curation offers an array of formal, historical, genre, sexual, social, and political frames, which provide a rich brew of contexts. This surfeit of meanings is carried by individual films, one by one, which breaks down abstractions into narrative bites and outsized emotions.

The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature

The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature
Author: Kuei-fen Chiu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-12-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9888528726

In The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature, Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang aim to bridge the distance between the scholarship of world literature and that of Chinese and Sinophone literary studies. This edited volume advances research on world literature by bringing in new developments in Chinese/Sinophone literatures and adds a much-needed new global perspective on Chinese literary studies beyond the traditional national literature paradigm and its recent critique by Sinophone studies. In addition to a critical mapping of the domains of world literature, Sinophone literature, and world literature in Chinese to delineate the nuanced differences of these three disciplines, the book addresses the issues of translation, genre, and the impact of media and technology on our understanding of “literature” and “literary prestige.” It also provides critical studies of the complicated ways in which Chinese and Sinophone literatures are translated, received, and reinvested across various genres and media, and thus circulate as world literature. The issues taken up by the contributors to this volume promise fruitful polemical interventions in the studies of world literature from the vantage point of Chinese and Sinophone literatures. “An outstanding volume full of insights, with chapters by leading scholars from an admirable range of perspectives, Chiu and Zhang’s The Making of Chinese-Sinophone Literatures as World Literature expertly integrates Chinese and Sinophone studies with world literature scholarship, opening numerous possibilities for future analyses of literature, media, and cultural history.” —Karen L. Thornber, Harvard University “This book is, at once, the best possible introduction to recent debates on world literature from the perspective of Chinese-Sinophone literatures, and a summa critica that thinks through their transcultural drives, global travels, varied worldings, and translational forces. The comparative perspectives gathered here accomplish the necessary and urgent task of reconfiguring both the idea of the world in world literature and the ways we study the inscriptions of Chinese-Sinophone literatures in the world.” —Mariano Siskind, Harvard University

Revolutionary Taiwan

Revolutionary Taiwan
Author: Catherine Lila Chou
Publisher: Cambria Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN:

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania). In the early 1990s, the people of Taiwan gained the right to vote for their executive and legislature. In building a democratic society, they transformed how they saw themselves and their homeland. The outcome of democratization was nothing less than revolutionary, producing a new, de facto nation and people that can be justly called "Taiwanese." Yet this revolution remains unfinished and incomplete. In an era of increasing US-China rivalry, the People's Republic of China (PRC) claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists that "reunification" is the historic mission of all peoples on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The PRC threatens war with and over the island, inviting a crisis that would engulf the region and beyond. Common ideas about Taiwan-that it "split with China in 1949" or "sees itself as the true China"-fail to explain why the Taiwanese withstand pressure from the PRC to relinquish their democratic self-governance. Revolutionary Taiwan sheds light on this. Each chapter shows how democratization in Taiwan constituted a revolution, changing not just the form of government but also how Taiwanese people conceptualized the island, coming to see it a complete nation unto itself. At the same time, however, Beijing has blocked the "normal" endpoint of this revolution: an open declaration of statehood and welcome into the global community. Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order brings the Taiwan story to a general audience. It will appeal to students and readers interested in international relations, contemporary geopolitics, and East Asian Studies. Informed by years of academic research and life in Taiwan, this book provides an entry point to a remarkable place and people.

Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power

Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power
Author: Song Hwee Lim
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2021-12-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0197503373

Why has Taiwanese film been so appealing to film directors, critics, and audiences across the world? This book argues that because Taiwan is a nation without hard political and economic power, cinema becomes a form of soft power tool that Taiwan uses to attract global attention, to gain support, and to build allies. Author Song Hwee Lim shows how this goal has been achieved by Taiwanese directors whose films win the hearts and minds of foreign audiences to make Taiwan a major force in world cinema. The book maps Taiwan's cinematic output in the twenty-first century through the three keywords in the book's subtitle-authorship, transnationality, historiography. Its object of analysis is the legacy of Taiwan New Cinema, a movement that begun in the early 1980s that has had a lasting impact upon filmmakers and cinephiles worldwide for nearly forty years. By examining case studies that include Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ang Lee, and Tsai Ming-liang, this book suggests that authorship is central to Taiwan cinema's ability to transcend borders to the extent that the historiographical writing of Taiwan cinema has to be reimagined. It also looks at the scaling down of soft power from the global to the regional via a cultural imaginary called little freshness, which describes films and cultural products from Taiwan that have become hugely popular in China and Hong Kong. In presenting Taiwan cinema's significance as a case of a small nation with enormous soft power, this book hopes to recast the terms and stakes of both cinema studies and soft power studies in academia.

Siting Postcoloniality

Siting Postcoloniality
Author: Pheng Cheah
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2022-11-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1478023953

The contributors to Siting Postcoloniality reevaluate the notion of the postcolonial by focusing on the Sinosphere—the region of East and Southeast Asia that has been significantly shaped by relations with China throughout history. Pointing out that the history of imperialism in China and Southeast Asia is longer and more complex than Euro-American imperialism, the contributors complicate the traditional postcolonial binaries of center-periphery, colonizer-colonized, and developed-developing. Among other topics, they examine socialist China’s attempts to break with Soviet cultural hegemony; the postcoloniality of Taiwan as it negotiates the legacy of Japanese colonial rule; Southeast Asian and South Asian diasporic experiences of colonialism; and Hong Kong’s complex colonial experiences under the British, the Japanese, and mainland China. The contributors show how postcolonial theory’s central concepts cannot adequately explain colonialism in the Sinosphere. Challenging fundamental axioms of postcolonial studies, this volume forcefully suggests that postcolonial theory needs to be rethought. Contributors. Pheng Cheah, Dai Jinhua, Caroline S. Hau, Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Wendy Larson, Liao Ping-hui, Lin Pei-yin, Lo Kwai-Cheung, Lui Tai-lok, Pang Laikwan, Lisa Rofel, David Wang, Erebus Wong, Robert J. C. Young

A World History of Chinese Literature

A World History of Chinese Literature
Author: Yingjin Zhang
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000895068

Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation. The sections cover the circulation and reception of China in world literature, as well as the worlds of: Chinese literature across the globe Borders, oceans, and rainforests Comparative literary genres Translingual writers and scholars Gender configurations Translation and transmediation With a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition. It will be of interest to anyone working on or studying Chinese literature, language and culture, as well as world literatures in relation to China.