Chinese Connections

Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora

Edited by See-Kam Tan, Peter X Feng, and Gina Marchetti
Book Cover

PB: $37.95
EAN: 978-1-59213-268-3
Publication: Jan 09

HC: $96.50
EAN: 978-1-59213-267-6
Publication: Jan 09

320 pages
6 x 9
1 figure, 16 halftones

How Chinese cinema and global Chinese culture intersect over questions of identity

Read the Introduction (pdf).

Description

Chinese Connections is a valuable new anthology that provides a prismatic look at the cross-fertilization between Chinese film and global popular culture. Leading film scholars consider the influence of world cinema on China-related and Chinese-related cinema over the last five decades. Highlighting the neglected connections between Chinese films and American and European cinema, the editors and contributors examine popular works such as Ang Lee’s The Hulk and Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep to show the nexus of international film production and how national, political, social and sexual identities are represented in the Chinese diaspora.

With talent flowing back and forth between East and West, Chinese Connections explores how issues of immigration, class, race and economic displacement are viewed on a global level, ultimately providing a greater understanding of the impact of Chinese filmmaking at home and abroad.

Contributors include: Grace An, Aaron Anderson, Chris Berry, Evans Chan, Li-Mei Chang, Frances Gateward, Andrew Grossman, Peter Hitchcock, Chuck Kleinhans, Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Helen Leung, Aaron Magnan-Park, Gayle Wald, Esther C.M. Yau, Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Xuelin Zhou and the editors.

Reviews

"According to its editors…Chinese Connections blazes a new trail, and it is easy to agree with them.... At times, the eclecticism of the contributions threatens to thwart the attempts of the book’s editors to impose order; but in a sense, it is the sheer scope and number of its essays which furnish this volume with its core strength. Chinese Connections contains 19 chapters in a volume just shy of 300 pages; and these pieces manage to cover essential films and essential filmmakers at the same time as straying into less tried terrain in stimulating ways. The result is a volume that has something to say to everyone from undergraduates to film specialists. Indeed, although the last few years have seen the publication of several high-quality, broad-sweep volumes on Chinese film – both nationally and transnationally – few have quite the reach and range of this one."
— The China Quarterly

"Overall, using 'transnational' China as the overarching framework, Chinese Connections touches on many key questions of Chinese culture, nation, and geopolitics....(The editors) point out important issues regarding the kinds of analytical frameworks we may use in analyzing global mediated culture."
— Jump Cut

"The book presents various perspectives of Chinese films, showing a multiplicity of approaches in studying Chinese cinema in general. The essays are insightful and well written and they all go a long way in helping the reader to understand the many facets of Chinese cinema."
— China Review International

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part I: Global Connections
1. False Consciousness and Double Consciousness: Race, Virtual Reality, and the Assimilation of Hong Kong
2. The Par-asian Cinematic Imaginary in Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep
3. The HK Venture: The Francophone Cine-logocentric Nexus
4. Wong Fei-Hung in Da House: Hong Kong Martial-Arts Films and Hip-Hop Culture
5. Same Difference: Racial Masculinity in Hong Kong and Cop-Buddy "Hybrids"
6. American Popular Music and Neocolonialism in the Films of Edward Yang
7. Hollywood and Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee's Hulk
8. Becoming Hollywood? Hong Kong Cinema in the New Century

Part II: Questions of Gender
 9. "From Behind the Wall": The Representation of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese Film
10. Beyond the Western Gaze: Orientalism, Feminism, and the Suffering Woman in Nontransnational Chinese Cinema
11. Disappearing Faces: Bisexuality and Transvestism in Two Hong Kong Comedies
12. Staging Gay Life in China: Zhang Yuan and East Palace, West Palace
13. Whose Fatal Ways: Mapping the Boundary and Consuming the Other in Border Crossing Films
14. Asian Martial-Arts Cinema, Dance, and the Cultural Languages of Gender

Part III: At the Millennium and Beyond
15. Singapore as a Society of Strangers: Eric Khoo's Mee Pok Man
16. Chinese Cinema Revisits the City: Beijng Trilogy and Global Urbanism of the 1990s
17. Taiwan Fever? Tsai Ming-Liang and the Everyday Postnation
18. The Spirits of Capital and Haunting Sounds: Translocal Historicism in Victim (1999)
19. Zhang Yimou's Hero: The Temptations of Fascism

Appendix A: On Chinese Names
Appendix B: Chinese Names, Words, and Phrases
Appendix C: Chinese-Language Filmography
Contributors
Index

About the Author(s)

Tan See-Kam is Associate Professor, Department of Communication, University of Macau, Macao SAR, China. Tan's research mainly focuses on gender and Chinese-language cinema and he has published widely in this area. He is co-editor of Hong Kong Film,and Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier.

Peter X Feng is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Delaware, where he teaches film history, Asian American Studies and Cultural Studies. He is the author of Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video and editor of Screening Asian Americans.

Gina Marchetti teaches at the University of Hong Kong in Comparative Literature and is the author of From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 1989-1997 (Temple) and Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction.


Subjects

Cinema Studies Asian Studies Mass Media and Communications