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This book reconsiders what actually constitutes the collection of the Qing imperial household during the Qianlong reign, which leads to the re-evaluation of the collection’s historiography, implications, significance and function. It questions the common presumption that there was a single and readily definable assemblage, which includes every physical object that had once been kept in the imperial palaces. This study also challenges the pervasive notion that collecting at the Qianlong court was highly individual and that the supposed collection reflected the emperor’s personal preferences and tastes. Lastly, this research confronts the popular interpretation of the function of the assumed collection, which was to display authority and to project various images to different groups of audience.

In the two decades since the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, Indonesia cinema has become one of the most productive and exciting film industries in Asia. From a position in the 1990s when local films were on the cultural periphery, they are now part of the mainstream with two new films in the cinemas every week. This book traces how the film industry reformed and returned to popularity and conceptualises it as a process of going mainstream. It overturns long held paradigms of national cinema and statism to see the film industry as pop culture in which market mechanisms are determinant. In going mainstream, new independent-minded filmmakers representing new creativity had to accommodate with capital and producers from old production companies. Appeal to audiences has resulting in the reimagining of the horror film and its traumas and the representation of new kinds of piety in a new subgenre Islamic themed films. Yet legacy structures and players remain, as the film industry has struggled to overcome regulation and censorship and the oligopoly of senior producers. In catering to a growing audience, the exhibition sector has become the focus of new investment as it becomes a site for competing local operators and global capital. The book argues for a reconceptualization of Indonesian cinema as pop culture with consequences to how Asian cinema is studied.

This volume aims to restore laughter to its proper position in the Mao-era culture. The Mao era was actually a period when laughter was bonded with political culture to an unprecedented degree. Spurred by dynamic political exigencies, many cultural products sought to utilize laughter as a more pliable form of political expression. Laughter was used to highlight antagonisms or downplay differences, to expose and ridicule the class enemy, or to meliorate and conceal contradictions; it could be ritualistic or heartfelt, didactic or cathartic, communal or utopic. In Maoist culture, laughter became a versatile discourse that brought together the political, the personal, the aesthetic, the ethical, the affective, the physical, the aural, and the visual. Therefore, the art of laughter was carefully moderated and regulated for political ends. Maoist laughter reveals the diversity, complexity, dynamics, and inner contradictions in the cultural production and reproduction in Mao’s China.

This book describes and theorizes the experiences of Uyghur graduates of the “Xinjiang Class” national boarding school program. These experiences reveal how young, educated Uyghurs strategically and selectively embrace elements of the corporate Chinese “Zhonghua minzu” identity in order to stretch the boundaries of a collective Uyghur identity. More specifically, Xinjiang Class students establish cross-regional bonds with Uyghur classmates and non-Xinjiang Class Uyghurs in inner China (neidi) and transnational bonds based on shared faith with foreign Muslims living in Chinese cities. These networks activate and perpetuate a transregional and often transnational ethno-national identity that is regularly communicated through Islamic practice.