Chinese Urban Shi-nema
Chinese Urban Shi-nema

Author: David H. Fleming

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 3030496759

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This book dives into the mise-en-scène of contemporary China to explore the “becoming cinema” of Chinese cities, societies, and subjectivities. Set in the wake of China’s radical and rapid period of urbanization and infrastructural transformation, and situating itself in the processual city of Ningbo, the book combines empirical, ficto-critical, and philosophical methods to generate a dynamic account of everyday life as new forms of consumer culture bed in. Harnessing a Realist approach that allows for different scales of analysis, the book zooms in on five architectural assemblages including: surreal real estate showrooms; a fragmented history museum; China’s “first and best” Sino-foreign university; a new “Old town”; and weird gamified “any-now(here)-spaces.” Together these modern arrangements and machines for living cast light upon the broader picture sweeping up greater China.

Cinema Illuminating Reality
Cinema Illuminating Reality

Author: Victor Fan

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1452964319

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A new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do this by using Buddhist ideas to examine the intricate relationship between technicity and consciousness in the cinema. The resulting dialogue between Buddhism and Euro-American philosophy is the first of its kind in film and media studies. Victor Fan examines cinema’s ontology and ontogenetic formation and how such a formational process produces knowledge, political agency, and in-aesthetics. Buddhism allows Fan to deconstruct binary thinking and reimagine media as an ecology, rethinking cinema in relational terms between the human and the machine. Along the way, Fan considers a wide variety of case studies from around the globe, while paying special attention to how contemporary Tibeto-Sinophone filmmakers have adopted relational thinking to detail ways of rebuilding a world that appears to be beyond repair. From Chinese queer cinema to a reexamination of Japanese master Ozu’s work and its historical reception to Christian Petzold’s 2018 existential thriller Transit, CinemaIlluminating Reality forges a remarkable path between Buddhist studies and cinema studies, casting vital new light on both of these important subjects.

Queering Gender, Sexuality, and Becoming-Human in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai
Queering Gender, Sexuality, and Becoming-Human in Qing Dynasty Zhiguai

Author: Thomas William Whyke

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-09-24

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9819942586

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This book offers queer readings of Chinese Qing Dynasty zhiguai, ‘strange tales’, a genre featuring supernatural characters and events. In a unique approach interweaving Chinese philosophies alongside critical theories, this book explores tales which speak to contemporary debates around identity and power. Depictions of porous boundaries between humans and animals, transformations between genders, diverse sexualities, and contextually unusual masculinities and femininities, lend such tales to queer readings. Unlike previous scholarship on characters as allegorical figures or stories as morality tales, this book draws on queer theory, animal studies, feminism, and Deleuzian philosophy, to explore the ‘strange’ and its potential for social critique. Examining such tales enriches the scope of historic queer world literatures, offering culturally situated stories of relationships, desires, and ways of being, that both speak to and challenge contemporary debates.

Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema
Experimental and Independent Italian Cinema

Author: Cristiano Anthony Cristiano

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-07-06

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1474474063

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Discussing a variety of independent and experimental Italian films, this book gives voice to a critcically neglected form of Italian cinema. By examining the work of directors such as Marinella Pirelli, Mirko Locatelli and Cesrae Zavattini, the book defines, inspects and studies the cinematic panorama of Italy through a new lens. It thereby explores the character of independent films and their related practices within the Italian historical, cultural and cinematic landscape.

Screening Scarlett Johansson
Screening Scarlett Johansson

Author: Janice Loreck

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-12-03

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 3030331962

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Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson’s persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson’s career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.

From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism
From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism

Author: Christine Daigle

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1350262242

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Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies – including Spinoza and Nietzsche – to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era.

Multimodal Communication
Multimodal Communication

Author: May Wong

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-04-29

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 3030154289

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This book draws on visual data, ranging from advertisements to postage stamps to digital personal photography, to offer a complex interpretation of the different social functions realised by these texts as semiotic artefacts. Framed within the media environment of the city of Hong Kong, the study demonstrates the importance of social context to meaning making and social semiotic multimodal analysis. This book will be of interest to readers in the arts, humanities and social sciences, particularly within the fields of semiotics, visual studies, design studies, media and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology.

The Opium War
The Opium War

Author: Julia Lovell

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1468313231

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This “crisp and readable account” of the nineteenth century British campaign sheds light on modern Chinese identity through “a heartbreaking story of war” (The Wall Street Journal). In October 1839, a Windsor cabinet meeting voted to begin the first Opium War against China. Bureaucratic fumbling, military missteps, and a healthy dose of political opportunism and collaboration followed. Rich in tragicomedy, The Opium War explores the disastrous British foreign-relations move that became a founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism, and depicts China’s heroic struggle against Western conspiracy. Julia Lovell examines the causes and consequences of the Opium War, interweaving tales of the opium pushers and dissidents. More importantly, she analyses how the Opium Wars shaped China’s self-image and created an enduring model for its interactions with the West, plagued by delusion and prejudice.

The Impulse to Gesture
The Impulse to Gesture

Author: Simon Harrison

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1108417205

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Establishing the inseparability of grammar and gesture, this book explains what determines when, how, and why we gesture.

Squid Cinema From Hell
Squid Cinema From Hell

Author: William Brown

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-04-02

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1474463746

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Here be Kraken! The Squid Cinema From Hell draws upon writers like Vilem Flusser, Donna J. Haraway, Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker to offer up a critical analysis of cephalopods and other tentacular creatures in contemporary media, while also speculating that digital media might themselves constitute a weird, intelligent alien. If this were not enough to shiver ye timbers, the book engages with contemporary discourses of posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and animal studies to suggest that humans are the products of media rather than media being the products of humans. Including case studies of films by Denis Villeneuve, Park Chan-wook and Celine Sciamma, The Squid Cinema From Hell also provides a daring engagement with various media beyond cinema, including literature, music videos, 4DX, advertising, websites, YouTube, Artificial Intelligence and more. Zounds! This unique and Lovecraftian book will change the way you think about, and with, our contemporary, media-saturated world. For as we contemplate the abyss, the abyss looks back at us - and chthulumedia, or media at the end of human times, begin to emerge.