Sentimental Fabulations Contemporary Chinese Films

Download or read book Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the sentimental? How can we understand it by way of the visual and narrative modes of signification specific to cinema and through the manners of social interaction and collective imagining specific to a particular culture in transition? What can the sentimental tell us about the precarious foundations of human coexistence in this age of globalization? Rey Chow explores these questions through nine contemporary Chinese directors (Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Yimou, Ann Hui, Peter Chan, Wayne Wang, Ang Lee, Li Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang) whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema. Approaching their works from multiple perspectives, including the question of origins, nostalgia, the everyday, feminine "psychic interiority," commodification, biopolitics, migration, education, homosexuality, kinship, and incest, and concluding with an account of the Chinese films' epistemic affinity with the Hollywood blockbuster Brokeback Mountain, Chow proposes that the sentimental is a discursive constellation traversing affect, time, identity, and social mores, a constellation whose contours tends to morph under different historical circumstances and in different genres and media. In contemporary Chinese films, she argues, the sentimental consistently takes the form not of revolution but of compromise, not of radical departure but of moderation, endurance, and accommodation. By naming these films sentimental fabulations screen artifacts of cultural becoming with irreducible aesthetic, conceptual, and speculative logics of their own Chow presents Chinese cinema first and foremost as an invitation to the pleasures and challenges of critical thinking.

Download or read book Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the sentimental and how can we understand it through the cinema of a particular culture in an age of globalisation? Chow explores these questions by examining nine contemporary Chinese directors whose accomplishments have become historic events in world cinema.

Download or read book Not Like a Native Speaker written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.

Download or read book Beyond Sinology written by Andrea Bachner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete "scripting" of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.

Download or read book The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A diverse set of texts from Foucault, Weber, Derrida and others are examined in this reconceptualization of the way ethnicity functions in capitalist society.

Download or read book Cinema, Emergence, and the Films of Satyajit Ray written by Keya Ganguly and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and organic study. Keya Ganguly's intellectual tour de force in this analysis of the great Indian film maker Satyajit Ray will provide a benchmark for future studies of the subject."--Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 "What distinguishes Ganguly's book from the more fashionable approaches to non-Western cinema is her willingness to assert the importance of European theory--specifically, writings on film by Eisenstein, Benjamin, Kracauer, Balázs, among others--as a way to elaborate Satyajit Ray's contributions in the larger postwar context of an international New Wave cinema movement. She does this with extraordinary intelligence and finesse, and the result is an illuminating statement on how a cinema that seems nostalgic for a disappearing cultural past can in fact be read, for the first time perhaps, for its intimations of an as-yet unrealized futurity."--Rey Chow, author of Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films

Download or read book Primitive Passions written by Rey Chow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Chinese cinema