Beyond Imperial Aesthetics

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics PDF Author: Mayumo Inoue
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888455877
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between “the West” and “Asia,” the authors of this volume re-examine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in this collection tackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production. By doing so, Beyond Imperial Aesthetics illuminates the aesthetic underside of critical theory to uncover alternative forms of political life in East Asia. “This much needed volume takes readers on an erudite and challenging journey. Along the way, its theoretically-minded authors explore what a future liberated from the Cold War shackles of securitized institutions and capitalist exploitation as well as concomitant epistemologies of aestheticized domination might look like in East Asia.” —Todd Henry, UC San Diego “Beyond Imperial Aesthetics is an impressive intervention between art, politics, and theoretical reflection in contemporary East Asia. The project convincingly articulates various sites of resistance to the postwar US hegemon throughout East Asia. The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a timely and compelling work.” —Richard Calichman, City College of New York

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics PDF Author: Mayumo Inoue
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888455877
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between “the West” and “Asia,” the authors of this volume re-examine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in this collection tackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production. By doing so, Beyond Imperial Aesthetics illuminates the aesthetic underside of critical theory to uncover alternative forms of political life in East Asia. “This much needed volume takes readers on an erudite and challenging journey. Along the way, its theoretically-minded authors explore what a future liberated from the Cold War shackles of securitized institutions and capitalist exploitation as well as concomitant epistemologies of aestheticized domination might look like in East Asia.” —Todd Henry, UC San Diego “Beyond Imperial Aesthetics is an impressive intervention between art, politics, and theoretical reflection in contemporary East Asia. The project convincingly articulates various sites of resistance to the postwar US hegemon throughout East Asia. The editors are to be congratulated for putting together such a timely and compelling work.” —Richard Calichman, City College of New York

Insurgent Aesthetics

Insurgent Aesthetics PDF Author: Ronak K. Kapadia
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN: 9781478004011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms “the sensorial life of empire.” In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Internationalist Aesthetics

Internationalist Aesthetics PDF Author: Edward Tyerman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023155298X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
Winner, 2022 AATSEEL Best Book in Literary Studies, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and European Languages Honorable Mention, 2022 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association Following the failure of communist revolutions in Europe, in the 1920s the Soviet Union turned its attention to fostering anticolonial uprisings in Asia. China, divided politically between rival military factions and dominated economically by imperial powers, emerged as the Comintern’s prime target. At the same time, a host of prominent figures in Soviet literature, film, and theater traveled to China, met with Chinese students in Moscow, and placed contemporary China on the new Soviet stage. They sought to reimagine the relationship with China in the terms of socialist internationalism—and, in the process, determine how internationalism was supposed to look and feel in practice. Internationalist Aesthetics offers a groundbreaking account of the crucial role that China played in the early Soviet cultural imagination. Edward Tyerman tracks how China became the key site for Soviet debates over how the political project of socialist internationalism should be mediated, represented, and produced. The central figure in this story, the avant-garde writer Sergei Tret’iakov, journeyed to Beijing in the 1920s and experimented with innovative documentary forms in an attempt to foster a new sense of connection between Chinese and Soviet citizens. Reading across genres and media from reportage and biography to ballet and documentary film, Tyerman shows how Soviet culture sought an aesthetics that could foster a sense of internationalist community. He reveals both the aspirations and the limitations of this project, illuminating a crucial chapter in Sino-Russian relations. Grounded in extensive sources in Russian and Chinese, this cultural history bridges Slavic and East Asian studies and offers new insight into the transnational dynamics that shaped socialist aesthetics and politics in both countries.

Worm-Time

Worm-Time PDF Author: We Jung Yi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501778587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Worm-Time challenges conventional narratives of the Cold War and its end, presenting an alternative cultural history based on evolving South Korean aesthetics about enduring national division. From novels of dissent during the authoritarian era to films and webtoons in the new millennium, We Jung Yi's transmedia analyses unearth people's experiences of "wormification"—traumatic survival, deferred justice, and warped capitalist growth in the wake of the Korean War. Whether embodied as refugees, leftists, or broken families, Yi's wormified protagonists transcend their positions as displaced victims of polarized politics and unequal development. Through metamorphoses into border riders who fly over or crawl through the world's dividing lines, they reclaim postcolonial memories buried in the pursuit of modernization under US hegemony and cultivate a desire for social transformation. Connecting colonial legacies, Cold War ideologies, and neoliberal economics, Worm-Time dares us to rethink the post-WWII consensus on freedom, peace, and prosperity.

Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana

Knowledge Production and Epistemic Decolonization at the End of Pax Americana PDF Author: Naoki Sakai
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000919447
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This book critically analyzes the global hegemony of the United States – a hegemony whose innovative aspect consists in articulating postcoloniality to imperial control – in relation to knowledge and knowledge production. Through targeted case studies on the historical relationship between regional areas and the United States, the authors explore possibilities and obstacles to epistemic decolonization. By highlighting the connection between the control of work and the control of communication that has been at the core of the colonial regimes of accumulation (‘classic colonialism’), they present an entirely new form of disciplinary practice, not based on the equation of evolution and knowledge. An extensive introduction outlines the historical genealogy of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony, while individual chapters examine the implications for different regions of the world and different domains of activity, including visual culture, economy, migration, the arts, and translation. This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including Asian studies, American studies, postcolonialism, and political theory.

The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature

The Aesthetics of Hope in Late Greek Imperial Literature PDF Author: Dawn LaValle Norman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108713993
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book sheds light on a relatively dark period of literary history, the late third century CE, a period that falls between the Second Sophistic and Late Antiquity. It argues that more was being written during this time than past scholars have realized and takes as its prime example the understudied Christian writer Methodius of Olympus. Among his many works, this book focuses on his dialogic Symposium, a text which exposes an era's new concern to re-orient the gaze of a generation from the past onto the future. Dr LaValle Norman makes the further argument that scholarship on the Imperial period that does not include Christian writers within its purview misses the richness of this period, which was one of deepening interaction between Christian and non-Christian writers. Only through recovering this conversation can we understand the transitional period that led to the rise of Constantine.

Fast Forward

Fast Forward PDF Author: Tim Harte
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299233235
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.

The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas

The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas PDF Author: Zhen Zhang
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040038077
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 723

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Book Description
Balancing leading scholars with emerging trendsetters, this Companion offers fresh perspectives on Asian cinemas and charts new constellations in the field with significance far beyond Asian cinema studies. Asian cinema studies – at the intersection of film/media studies and area studies – has rapidly transformed under the impact of globalization, compounded by the resurgence of a variety of nationalist discourses as well as counter-discourses, new socio-political movements, and the possibilities afforded by digital media. Differentiated experiences of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have further heightened interest in the digital everyday and the renewed geopolitical divide between East and West, and between North and South. Thematized into six sections, the 46 chapters in this anthology address established paradigms of scholarship and viewership in Asian cinemas like extreme genres, cinephilia, festivals, and national cinema, while also highlighting political and archival concerns that firmly situate Asian cinemas within local and translocal milieus. Underrepresented cinemas of North Korea, Bangladesh, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Cambodia, appear here amidst a broader cross-regional, comparative approach. An ideal resource for film, media, cultural and Asian studies researchers, students, and scholars, as well as informed readers with an interest in Asian cinemas.

Beyond Chinoiserie

Beyond Chinoiserie PDF Author: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004387838
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western “vision of Cathay” formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and photographs. Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers’ attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.

The Yakuza in Popular Media

The Yakuza in Popular Media PDF Author: Frank Jacob
Publisher: Büchner-Verlag
ISBN: 3963178051
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
The yakuza, Japan's traditional gangsters, are famous, especially outside Japan, where the country's criminal underworld ranks next to sushi or Godzilla when it comes to their respective fame and popularity. However, in popular media the images of the Japanese gangster vary, ranging from chivalrous Robin Hood-like characters, to violent mobsters without honor and dignity. The present volume addresses these differences, i.e. the way yakuza are presented in Japanese and Western popular media. Films and autobiographical novels, inspired by historical events or personal experiences, but also by existent and sometimes even expected stereotypes, therefore often already represent a specific image of the Japanese mafia that is more like an artificial construct than actual reality. The contributions in this book consequently intend to discuss the images of the Japanese yakuza in popular media to offer a first insight into a very important yet so far understudied topic related to the history of and existent narratives within Japan's popular culture.