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The Authorship of Place is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the politics, history, aesthetics, and practices of location shooting for Taiwanese, Mainland Chinese, and coproduced art cinemas shot in rural communities since the late 1970s. Lo argues that rural location shooting, beyond serving aesthetic and technical needs, constitutes practices of cultural survival in a region beset with disruptive social changes, including rapid urbanization, geopolitical shifts, and ecological crises. In response to these social changes, auteurs like Hou Xiaoxian, Jia Zhangke, Chen Kaige, and Li Xing transformed sites of film production into symbolically meaningful places of collective memories and aspirations. These production practices ultimately enabled auteurs to experiment with imagining communities in novel and contentious ways. Guiding readers on a cross-strait tour of prominent shooting locations for the New Chinese Cinemas, this book shows how auteurs sought out their disappearing cultural heritage by reenacting lived experiences of nation building, homecoming, and cultural salvage while shooting on-location. This was an especially daunting task when auteurs encountered the shooting locations as spaces of unresolved historical, social, and geopolitical contestations, tensions which were only intensified by the impact of filmmaking on rural communities. This book demonstrates how complex circumstances surrounding location shooting were pivotal in shaping representations of the rural on-screen, as well as the production communities, institutions, and industries off-screen. Bringing together cutting-edge perspectives in cultural geography and media anthropology, this work revises Chinese film history and theorizes ground-breaking approaches for investigating the cultural politics of film authorship and production.

Based on extensive ethnographic work, Comfort Women Activism examines how women activists in Japan, Japanese and Koreans, have come to understand the comfort women issue. The movement in Japan has evolved as part of transnational activism, in which the activists in Japan play a crucial role in lobbying legislators and generating public opinion conducive to the state’s compensation. By presenting the activists’ narratives, the book illuminates the nuanced understandings of the issue they have developed through face-to-face communication with survivors. Their diverse voices shed light on the multifaceted aspects of the movement. The book also provides an account of the movement’s thirty-year history and an overview of scholarly arguments presented in Japanese. Many of the activists’ thoughts are relevant to scholarly debates on the comfort women issue, exemplifying, substantiating, and commenting on what researchers have said. By measuring the activist narratives against scholarly debates, the book argues that comfort women activism in Japan is a new form of feminism characterized by critical historical consciousness; the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and class; mutual transformation; and transnational solidarity. Most importantly, it argues that women activists in Japan, a former colonial empire, have avoided falling into imperialist feminism through the act of listening to survivors wholeheartedly.

This book explores the way personal memories and micro-narratives of the Cultural Revolution are represented in post-2001 films and television dramas in mainland China, unravelling the complex political, social and cultural forces imbricated within the personalized narrative modes of remembering the past in postsocialist China. While representations of personal stories mushroomed after the Culture Revolution, the deepened marketization and privatization after 2001 have triggered a new wave of representations of personal memories on screen, which divert from those earlier allegorical narratives and are more sentimental, fragmented and nostalgic. The personalized reminiscences of the past suggest an alternative narrative to official history and grand narratives, and at the same time, by promoting the sentiment of nostalgia, they also become a marketing strategy. Rather than perceiving the rising micro-narratives as either homogeneous or autonomous, this book argues that they often embody disparate qualities and potentials. Moreover, the various micro-narratives and personal memories at play facilitate fresh understandings of China’s socialist past and postsocialist present: the legacies of socialism continue to influence China, constituting the postsocialist reality that accommodates different ideologies and temporalities.

This is the first collection of English essays on Du Fu, commonly regarded the greatest Chinese poet. Contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, these essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu’s poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts. They discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; tradition and modernity. Many of the poems analyzed in the volume were written in the backwater Kuizhou, far from Du Fu’s earlier residence in the capital city Chang’an, at a time when the Tang dynasty was going through devastating social and political disturbances. The authors contend that Du Fu’s isolation from the elite literary establishments allowed him to become a pioneer who introduced a new order to the Chinese poetic discourse. However, his attention to details in everyday reality, his preoccupation with domestic life and the larger issues embroiled in it, his humor, and his ability to surprise tend to be obscured by the clichéd image of the “poet sage” and “poet historian”—an image this collection of essays successfully complicates.