film – UH Press

The U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, biannual publication, available in print and online that promotes scholarly exchange on social, cultural, political, and economic issues pertaining to gender and Japan. The U.S.–Japan Women’s Journal encourages comparative study among Japan, the United States, and other countries. We welcome contributions from all academic fields in the social sciences and humanities and proposals for special issues. Our mission is to foster the work of young researchers and to ensure that the achievements of established scholars are not forgotten.

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Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics Book Review Seminar

Posted on June 14, 2013 by stephchun

Sheldon Lu will be participating in a book review seminar of his recent book Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture, at City University of Hong Kong on Friday, June 28, 4:30-6:30 pm. For more information, go to: http://ctl.cityu.edu.hk/NewsCentre/f_usr/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1356&FORUM_ID=8&CAT_ID=1&FORUM_TITLE=Upcoming+Events.

Professor Lu is also the editor (with Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh) of Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics and Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender.

April 2013 Author Events

Posted on April 10, 2013 by UH Press Marketing

Whether you’re in or near New York, Carlsbad, D.C., or Kaunakakai, please join UHP authors at their events!

Thursday, April 11
6:30 to 8 p.m.
Bianca Bosker will be at the China Institute, NYC, to speak on her intriguing new book, Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, and the phenomenon of “duplitecture.” Click here for event details and to purchase tickets ($10 member / $15 non-member).

For more on this fascinating topic:
Read the Atlantic article Duplitectural Marvels: Exploring China’s Replica Western Cities
Listen to an interview of Bianca Bosker by Chris Gondek of Heronandcrane on Portland State’s KPSU.

Saturday, April 13
2:00 p.m.
Head over to the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California for “Sincerely, Ukulele,” featuring Jim Tranquada’s book talk on The ‘Ukulele: A History, followed by a performance by ‘ukulele artist Brittni Paiva. For details and to purchase tickets, click here.

Sunday, April 14
In a mash-up of sorts, two UH Press authors will present short lectures as part of the National Cherry Blossom Festival‘s two-day anime marathon, which will feature all 26 episodes of Shinichiro Watanabe’s Samurai Champloo. Both talks are free and will be held in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art.

11:00 a.m.
“Ukiyo-e Pictures and the World of the Pleasure Quarters”
Julie Nelson Davis, associate professor in the Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Utamaro and the Spectacle of Beauty.

3:00 p.m.
“Picaresque Tales, Travelers and Lawbreakers”
Constantine Vaporis, professor and director of Asian studies, University of Maryland Baltimore Campus; author of Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan.

Wednesday, April 24
5:30 p.m.
Anwei Law will sign her monumental work, Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory, at Kalele Bookstore & Divine Expressions in the heart of Kaunakakai, Moloka‘i. Currently a resident of Seneca Falls, NY, where she works as the international coordinator of IDEA, she will be visiting Hawai‘i during most of May–watch for a post on next month’s events.

Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood

Posted on March 7, 2013 by stephchun

From melodrama to Cantonese opera, from silents to 3D animated film, Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Hollywood, by Yiman Wang, traces cross-Pacific film remaking over the last eight decades. Wang revolutionizes our understanding of Chinese cinema as national cinema. Against the diffusion model of national cinema spreading from a central point—Shanghai in the Chinese case—she argues for a multi-local process of co-constitution and reconstitution. In this spirit, Wang analyzes how southern Chinese cinema (huanan dianying) morphed into Hong Kong cinema through trans-regional and trans-national interactions that also produced a vision of Chinese cinema.

“This study of remaking in Chinese cinema is both one of the most sophisticated and insightful analyses of the remake phenomenon in general and a work that reveals a series of fascinating and hitherto occluded connections and links in Chinese-language film history. Each case study is a revelation for the reader. This rigorous and original piece of scholarship reveals, investigates and narrates forgotten connections across borders and between major filmmaking cities and in this way makes new contributions to film history. The primary readership for the work will be students and scholars of Chinese cinema, but its contribution to larger debates about transnational cinema and remaking in general should be recognized and it should find a wider readership in cinema studies, as well as in Chinese studies.” —Chris Berry, University of London

Critical Interventions
March 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3607-8 / $49.00 (CLOTH)

Tracing Obscenity Trials in Postwar Japan

Posted on July 13, 2012 by stephchun

In 2002 a manga (comic book) was for the first time successfully charged with the crime of obscenity in the Japanese courts. In The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Kirsten Cather traces how this case represents the most recent in a long line of sensational landmark obscenity trials that have dotted the history of postwar Japan. The objects of these trials range from a highbrow literary translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and modern adaptations and reprintings of Edo-period pornographic literary “classics” by authors such as Nagai Kafu to soft core and hard core pornographic films, including a collection of still photographs and the script from Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses, as well as adult manga. At stake in each case was the establishment of a new hierarchy for law and culture, determining, in other words, to what extent the constitutional guarantee of free expression would extend to art, artist, and audience.

“The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan is among the most lucid and engaging cross-disciplinary projects to emerge from Japan studies in recent years. It will appeal to a broad readership both inside and outside Japan studies, in particular scholars of literature, visual culture, law, and the emerging field of affect studies. Kirsten Cather accomplishes this remarkable feat by combining close readings of aesthetic, literary, and visual texts; careful exegesis of court cases and juridical documents; and detailed rendering of cultural, historical, and political contexts. The Art of Censorship demonstrates once and for all, without ever forcing the issue, that culture and politics are inexorably intertwined. I can think of no other study in the Japanese case that does it so well.” —Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Columbia University

Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute
July 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3587-3 / $45.00 (CLOTH)

Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age

Posted on May 15, 2012 by stephchun

Digital technology has transformed cinema’s production, distribution, and consumption patterns and pushed contemporary cinema toward increasingly global markets. In the case of Japanese cinema, a once moribund industry has been revitalized as regional genres such as anime and Japanese horror now challenge Hollywood’s preeminence in global cinema. In Japanese Cinema in the Digital Age, a rigorous investigation of J-horror, personal documentary, anime, and ethnic cinema, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano deliberates on the role of the transnational in bringing to the mainstream what were formerly marginal B-movie genres. She argues persuasively that convergence culture, which these films represent, constitutes Japan’s response to the variegated flows of global economics and culture.

May 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3594-1 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

New in the Critical Interventions Series

Posted on December 1, 2011 by stephchun

Postsocialist China is marked by paradoxes: economic boom, political conservatism, cultural complexity. Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China, Haomin Gong’s dynamic study of these paradoxes, or “unevenness,” provides a unique and seminal approach to contemporary China. Reading unevenness as a problem and an opportunity simultaneously, Gong investigates how this dialectical social situation shapes cultural production.

Critical Interventions
December 2011 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3531-6 / $47.00 (CLOTH)

New York Times on Independent Chinese Film

Posted on February 18, 2011 by stephchun

Yesterday’s New York Times features an article by Larry Rohter on five Chinese directors whose films will be shown at the Museum of Modern Arts’ Documentary Fortnight festival. The article includes a quote from Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, the author of Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, published by UH Press.

The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film

Posted on May 26, 2010 by stephchun

Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film, by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film. She unites aesthetics with history in her argument that the rise of cinema in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the late 1980s was partly fueled by burgeoning literary movements. Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s highly acclaimed films Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, and To Live are built on the experimental works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, and Yu Hua, respectively. Hong Kong new wave’s Ann Hui and Stanley Kwan capitalized on the irresistible visual metaphors of Eileen Chang’s postrealism. Hou Xiaoxian’s new Taiwan cinema turned to fiction by Huang Chunming and Zhu Tianwen for fine-grained perspectives on class and gender relations. Delving equally into the individual approaches of directors and writers, Deppman initiates readers into the exciting possibilities emanating from the world of Chinese cinema.

“Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s ambitious book investigates the complex associative and conceptual interaction between literature and film, arguing that in many cases, a structural connection underlies the relationship. Her work is a strong challenge to those who believe literature and film should always be regarded as completely separate and unrelated. Deppman’s fascinating chapter on the hip Wong Kar-wai and his debt to novelist Liu Yichang well illustrates the way in which directors can play with and play off of narrative structures, in the process setting up a provocative intersection.” –Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

May 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3454-8 / $27.00 (PAPER)

Books

Journals

Category: film

China Review International Vol. 24 No. 4 (2017)