"Tobacco has been pervasive in China almost since its introduction from the Americas in the mid-sixteenth century. One-third of the world's smokers--over 350 million--now live in China, and they account for 25 percent of worldwide smoking-related deaths. This book examines the deep roots of China's contemporary "cigarette culture" and smoking epidemic and provides one of the first comprehensive histories of Chinese consumption in global and comparative perspective"--Provided by publisher.
On the eve of his coming of age, a young Lord begins to see the truth of his parents' lives: his mother cannot buy her way into society no matter how hard he tries, and his father is being ruined by her continued attempts. The young Lord then travels to his home in Ireland, encountering adventure on the way, and discovers that the native residents are being exploited in his father's absence.
This is an entirely new edition of the author′s 1984 study (originally published by South End Press) of radical media and movements. The first and second sections are original to this new edition. The first section explores social and cultural theory in order to argue that radical media should be a central part of our understanding of media in history. The second section weaves an historical and international tapestry of radical media to illustrate their centrality and diversity, from dance and graffiti to video and the internet and from satirical prints and street theatre to culture-jamming, subversive song, performance art and underground radio. The section also includes consideration of ultra-rightist media as a key contrast case. The book′s third section provides detailed case-studies of the anti-fascist media explosion of 1974-75 in Portugal, Italy′s long-running radical media, radio and access video in the USA, and illegal media in the dissolution of the former Soviet bloc dictatorships.
"The author's capacity to grasp and interpret these [world media] events is astounding, and her ability to provide insights into a world where unbounded information is circling the earth with the speed of light is startling." -- Choice "... a wide-ranging, quirky and dextrous mix of description, theory and analysis, that documents the perils of the global telecommunications network... " -- Times Literary Supplement "... this is a stimulating, even moving, book, dense with ideas and with many quotable lines." -- The New Statesman "Wark is one of the most original and interesting cultural critics writing today." -- Lawrence Grossberg McKenzie Wark writes about the experience of everyday life under the impact of increasingly global media vectors. We no longer have roots, we have aerials. We no longer have origins, we have terminals.
"... an important contribution to the study of recent Chinese literature." -- Choice "This fine, scholarly survey of Chinese literature since 1949... discusses such trends as modernism, nativism, realism, root-seeking and 'scar' literature, 'misty' poets, and political, feminist, and societal issues in modern Chinese literature." -- Library Journal This volume is a survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the twentieth century. It has three goals: (1) to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; (2) to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; (3) to observe the historical factors that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across the Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas.
The thirteen essays in this volume, all by experts in the field of Chinese studies, reflect the diversity of approaches scholars follow in the study of China's past. Together they reveal the depth and vitality of Chinese civilization and demonstrate how an understanding of traditional China can enrich and broaden our own contemporary worldview.
Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varied body of foreign literature and began writing underground poetry. In the 1980s this poetry scene, now above ground, became one of pluriformity and proliferation in both official and unofficial circuits. The brutal suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement gave it an exile offshoot. The historical overview in Part I of this book is complemented in Part II by a discussion of Duoduo's poetry. Duoduo's career as a poet reflects the vicissitudes of Chinese Experimental poetry - and his beautiful, headstrong poems merit attention in themselves. They show that Chinese poetry is not just of interest as a chronicle of Chinese politics, but as literature in its own right.
After a long spell of chaos, the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE) saw the unification of the Chinese Empire under a single ruler, government, and code of law. During this era, changing social and political institutions affected the ways people conceived of womanhood. New ideals were promulgated, and women's lives gradually altered to conform to them. And under the new political system, the rulers' consorts and their families obtained powerful roles that allowed women unprecedented influence in the highest level of government. Recognized as the leading work in the field, this introductory survey offers the first sustained history of women in the early imperial era. Now in a revised edition that incorporates the latest scholarship and theoretical approaches, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources in Chinese and Japanese to paint a remarkably detailed picture of the distant past. Bret Hinsch's introductory chapters orient the nonspecialist to early imperial Chinese society; subsequent chapters discuss women's roles from the multiple perspectives of kinship, wealth and work, law, government, learning, ritual, and cosmology. An enhanced array of line drawings, a Chinese-character glossary, and extensive notes and bibliography enhance the author's discussion. Historians and students of gender and early China alike will find this book an invaluable overview.
