Author: Yuxin Ma
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299340201
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
Following the Japanese invasion of northeast China in 1931, the occupying authorities established the Manchuria Film Association to promote film production efficiency and serve Japan’s propaganda needs. Manchuria Film Association had two tasks: to make “national policy films” as part of a cultural mission of educating Chinese in Manchukuo (the puppet state created in 1932) on the special relationship between Japan and the region, and to block the exhibition of Chinese films from Shanghai that contained anti-Japanese messages. The corporation relied on Japanese capital, technology, and film expertise, but it also employed many Chinese filmmakers. After the withdrawal of Japanese forces in 1945, many of these individuals were portrayed as either exploited victims or traitorous collaborators. Yuxin Ma seeks to move the conversation beyond such simplistic and inaccurate depictions. By focusing on the daily challenges and experiences of the Chinese workers at the corporation, Ma examines how life was actually lived by people navigating between practical and ideological concerns. She illustrates how the inhabitants of Manchukuo navigated social opportunities, economic depression, educational reforms, fascist rule, commercial interests, practical daily needs, and more—and reveals ways in which these conflicting preoccupations sometimes manifested as tension and ambiguity on screen. In the battle between repression and expression, these Chinese actors, directors, writers, and technicians adopted defensive and opportunistic tactics. They did so in colonial spaces, often rejecting modernist representations of Manchukuo in favor of venerating traditional Chinese culture and values. The expertise, skills, and professional networks they developed extended well beyond the occupation into the postwar period, and may individuals reestablished themselves as cinema professionals in the socialist era.
Author: Alexandria Innes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000651088
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
This book uncovers the contradictions and convergences of racism, decolonisation, migration and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and from nationalism to transnationalism between the 1950s and the present. It takes up the story of Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, a colonial migrant to the UK from Cyprus, as a reflection on how the everyday lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. The research uncovers and offers insight into the complexities and messiness of everyday life and of (trans)national identities as they are lived and have been lived at the heart of imperial, colonial and postcolonial systems and processes. The innovative methodological approach adopts memoirs gathered through a series of life-narrative interviews and is guided by theories of minor transnationalism that look to foreground horizontal relations between minor figures. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story and his family life, including colonialism, geopolitics, citizenship, security, migration and transnationalism. Examining how these themes play out in everyday life permits his practice and lived experience to theorise the international politics of colonialism, migration and citizenship. This book argues that Politics and International Relations can benefit from a transnational approach and offers a method of theory-in-practice for exploring the everyday experience of transnationalism, through the methodology of life-narrative and memoir.
Author: Neil Forsyth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691113395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
The Satan of Paradise Lost has fascinated generations of readers. This book attempts to explain how and why Milton's Satan is so seductive. It reasserts the importance of Satan against those who would minimize the poem's sympathy for the devil and thereby make Milton orthodox. Neil Forsyth argues that William Blake got it right when he called Milton a true poet because he was "of the Devils party" even though he set out "to justify the ways of God to men." In seeking to learn why Satan is so alluring, Forsyth ranges over diverse topics--from the origins of evil and the relevance of witchcraft to the status of the poetic narrator, the epic tradition, the nature of love between the sexes, and seventeenth-century astronomy. He considers each of these as Milton introduces them: as Satanic subjects. Satan emerges as the main challenge to Christian belief. It is Satan who questions and wonders and denounces. He is the great doubter who gives voice to many of the arguments that Christianity has provoked from within and without. And by rooting his Satanic reading of Paradise Lost in Biblical and other sources, Forsyth retrieves not only an attractive and heroic Satan but a Milton whose heretical energies are embodied in a Satanic character with a life of his own.
Author: Michel de Certeau
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271459
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
Author: Robert Calder
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029934620X
Category : Film adaptations
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most prominent and productive authors of the twentieth century--and his works have been among the most cinematically transformed in history. For more than five decades, adaptations of his plays, stories, and novels dominated movie theaters and, later, television screens. More than ninety individual works were filmed, and for many filmgoers his name was a greater draw than that of the director. Works such as Of Human Bondage, "The Letter," The Painted Veil, "Rain," The Razor's Edge, and others were produced multiple times, with starring roles sought by actors like Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, Charles Laughton, and Bill Murray. This study of the famous author explores the relationship between literature and film, what is involved in adaptation, and how best to judge films based on celebrated books. Robert Calder, the world's leading scholar of Maugham's work, offers fascinating production histories, insight into both fortunate and misguided casting decisions, shrewd analyses of performances and film techniques, and summaries of public and critical responses. Maugham's characters were often conflicted, iconoclastic, and morally out of step with their times, which may have accounted for the popularity of his fiction. Most of Maugham's works could be adapted to satisfy the tastes of moviegoers and the demands of the Hays Office censors, if not the expectations of their author.
Author: Jenny Shaw
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820346349
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial subjects--Irish and Africans--contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked within--and challenged--the limits of the colonial regime. Shaw's research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean. The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations, and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.
Author: Julia C. Obert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019888124X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
The Making and Unmaking of Colonial Cities is a comparative study of architectural space in four (post-)colonial capitals: Belfast, Northern Ireland; Windhoek, Namibia; Bridgetown, Barbados; and Hanoi, Vietnam. Each chapter takes up one of these cities, outlining its history of building and urban planning under colonial rule and linking that history to its contemporary shape and scope. This genealogical information is drawn from primary source documents and archival materials. The chapters then look to local literary texts to better understand the lingering impact of colonial building practices on individuals living in (post-)colonial cities today. These texts often foreground the difficulty of moving through a city that can never feel comfortably one's own; legacies of racial segregation, buildings that disregard indigenous resources, and street names that serve as constant reminders of a history of oppression, for example, can produce feelings of anxiety, even of unbelonging, for native subjects. However, the literature also highlights ways in which the subversive wanderings of particular pedestrians--taking shortcuts, trespassing in forbidden places, diverting spaces from their intended uses--can contest 'official' topography. Bodies can therefore move against the power of a repressive regime, at least to some degree, even when that power is literally set in stone. Obert argues for the significance of these small gestures of reclamation, suggesting that we must counterpose the potential flexibility of lived space to the prohibitions of the map in order to more fully understand (post-)colonial power relations.
Author: Christine Leteux
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299339807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275
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Book Description
From 1940 to 1944, the German-owned Continental Films dominated the French film landscape, producing thirty features throughout the Nazi occupation. Charged with producing entertaining and profitable films rather than propaganda, producer Alfred Greven employed some of the greatest French actors and most prestigious directors of the time, including Maurice Tourneur, Henri Decoin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Marcel Carné. Using recently opened archival documents, including reams of testimony from the épuration (purification) hearings conducted shortly after the war, Christine Leteux has produced the most authoritative and complete history of the company and its impact on the French film industry—both during the war and after. She captures the wide range of responses to the firm from those who were eager to work for a company whose ideology matched their own, to others who reluctantly accepted contracts out of necessity, to those who abhorred the company but felt compelled to participate in order to protect family members from Nazi reprisals. She examines not only the formation and management of Continental Films but also the personalities involved, the fraught and often deadly political circumstances of the period, the critical reception of the films, and many of the more notorious and controversial events. As Bertrand Tavernier explains in his foreword, Leteux overturns many of the preconceptions and clichés that have come to be associated with Continental Films. Published to rave reviews in French and translated by the author into English, this work shatters expectations and will reinvigorate study of a lesser-known but significant period of French film history.
Author: Mark E. Caprio
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295990406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
From the late nineteenth century, Japan sought to incorporate the Korean Peninsula into its expanding empire. Japan took control of Korea in 1910 and ruled it until the end of World War II. During this colonial period, Japan advertised as a national goal the assimilation of Koreans into the Japanese state. It never achieved that goal. Mark Caprio here examines why Japan's assimilation efforts failed. Utilizing government documents, personal travel accounts, diaries, newspapers, and works of fiction, he uncovers plenty of evidence for the potential for assimilation but very few practical initiatives to implement the policy. Japan's early history of colonial rule included tactics used with peoples such as the Ainu and Ryukyuan that tended more toward obliterating those cultures than to incorporating the people as equal Japanese citizens. Following the annexation of Taiwan in 1895, Japanese policymakers turned to European imperialist models, especially those of France and England, in developing strengthening its plan for assimilation policies. But, although Japanese used rhetoric that embraced assimilation, Japanese people themselves, from the top levels of government down, considered Koreans inferior and gave them few political rights. Segregation was built into everyday life. Japanese maintained separate communities in Korea, children were schooled in two separate and unequal systems, there was relatively limited intermarriage, and prejudice was ingrained. Under these circumstances, many Koreans resisted assimilation. By not actively promoting Korean-Japanese integration on the ground, Japan's rhetoric of assimilation remained just that.
Author: International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839470552
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Authoritarianism operates on a visceral level rather than relying on arguments. How can we counter authoritarian affects? This publication brings together more than 50 first-hand accounts of anti-authoritarian movements, activists, artists, and scholars from around the world, focusing on the sensuous and emotional dimension of their strategies. From the collective art and aesthetics of feminist movements in India, Iran, Mexico, and Poland, to sewing collectives, subversive internet art in Hong Kong, and even anti-authoritarian board games, the contributions open new perspectives on moments of resistance, subversion, and creation. Indeed, the handbook itself is a work of anti-authoritarian art. The editors behind the »International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies« and »kollektiv orangotango« are: Aurel Eschmann, Börries Nehe, Nico Baumgarten, Paul Schweizer, Severin Halder, Ailynn Torres Santana, Inés Duràn Matute, and Julieta Mira.
