• 320 pages
  • 6 x 9
  • 1 figure, 16 halftones
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  • Price: $37.95
  • EAN: 9781592132683
  • Publication: Jan 2009
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  • Price: $96.50
  • EAN: 9781592132676
  • Publication: Jan 2009
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Chinese Connections

Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora

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

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

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.