Search Results

ENGLISH

Shanghai Homes - Palimpsests Of Private Life

by Jie Li

37,85€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 In a book that is part microhistory, part memoir, Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who witnessed spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories. Exploring three dimensions of private life--territories, artifacts, and gossip--Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century.
ENGLISH

Chinese Thirdspace - The Paradox Of Moderate Politics, 19462020

by Jianmei Liu

~~35,52€~~ 31,97€ 10% OFF

 Chinese intellectuals have long chafed under the dominance of dualitiesthe sense that they are trapped between two diametrically opposed forces, with no choice but to pick one side or the other. Over the years, they have been driven into binary debates such as reform versus revolution, tradition versus modernity, the West versus the East, and left versus right. At the same time, a number of key thinkers have sought to transcend the extremes and find middle ground. This book examines how a diverse set of Chinese intellectuals carved out in-between spaces beyond the poles of competing ideologies for greater openness, multiplicity, and pluralism. Reappropriating and rehistoricizing the concept of Thirdspacetheorized by Homi Bhabha and Edward SojaJianmei Liu traces how writers and artists, in different times and places, have explored and developed alternatives to either/or dichotomies. Chinese Thirdspace brings together an unexpected group of cases, including Zhang Dongsuns political philosophy, Yin Haiguangs colorless thought, Jin Yongs martial arts fiction, Liu Zaifus fragmentary writing, Gao Xingjians transmedia cine-poems, Xi Xis hybrid works, Chi Zijians eulogy of shamanism, Chu Tien-Hsins various heterotopias, and Chan Koonchungs speculative political novel, concluding with the controversy over Fang Fangs Wuhan Diary. Their works offer new ways to grapple with the modern Chinese experience, and as Liu shows, they contain alternative possibilities for a future beyond the binary oppositions of our current era. Wide-ranging and theoretically rich, this interdisciplinary book demonstrates the pivotal role of Thirdspace in the intellectual history, politics, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, art, and film of modern China.
ENGLISH

Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines - A Reader

~~59,61€~~ 53,65€ 10% OFF

 Sinophone studies—the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world—has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies. This reader presents the latest and most cutting-edge work in Sinophone studies, bringing together both senior and emerging scholars to highlight the interdisciplinary reach and significance of this vital field. It argues that Sinophone studies has developed a distinctive conceptualization of power at the convergence of different intellectual traditions, offering new approaches to questions of plurality, hierarchy, oppression, and resistance. In so doing, this book shows, Sinophone studies has provided valuable conceptual tools for the study of minoritized and racialized communities in diverse global settings. Essays also consider how the rise of China has affected Sinophone communities and the idea of Chineseness around the world, among other timely topics. Showcasing cross-fertilization and diversification that traverse and transcend conventional scholarly boundaries, Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines gives readers an unparalleled survey of the past, present, and future of this inherently interdisciplinary field.
ENGLISH

Fear Of Seeing - A Poetics Of Chinese Science Fiction

by Mingwei Song

33,60€ + 10% CARD

 Winner, 2023 SFRA Book Award, Science Fiction Research Association A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of Chinas new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership. Fear of Seeing traces the new waves origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisiblewhat society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genres significance for twenty-first-century literature.
ENGLISH

Fear Of Seeing - A Poetics Of Chinese Science Fiction

by Mingwei Song

40,56€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Fear of Seeing traces the new wave of Chinese science fictionâ€™s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital.
ENGLISH

Questioning Borders - Ecoliteratures Of China And Taiwan

by Robin Visser

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls "Beijing Westerns" with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.
ENGLISH

Malaysian Crossings - Place And Language In The Worlding Of Modern Chinese Literature

by Cheow Thia Chan

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing. Highlighting Mahua literature’s distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the "worlding" of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian "crossings" of Mahua literary production—physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts—from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.
ENGLISH

Politics And Cultural Nativism In 1970s Taiwan - Youth, Narrative, Nationalism

by A-Chin Hsiau

40,56€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 In recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt.
ENGLISH

Musha Incident - A Reader On The Indigenous Uprising In Colonial Taiwan

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with banned poison gas. The Seediq from Mhebu, who led the uprising, were brought to the brink of genocide. Over the ensuing decades, the Musha Incident became seen as a central moment in Taiwan’s colonial history, and different political regimes and movements have seized on it for various purposes. Under the Japanese, it was used to attest to the "barbarity" of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes; the Nationalist regime cited the uprising as proof of the Taiwanese peoples’ heroism and solidarity with the Chinese in resisting the Japanese; and pro-independence groups in Taiwan have portrayed the Seediq people and their history as exemplars of Taiwan’s "authentic" cultural traditions, which stand apart from that of mainland China. This book brings together leading scholars to provide new perspectives on one of the most traumatic episodes in Taiwan’s modern history and its fraught legacies. Contributors from a variety of disciplines revisit the Musha Incident and its afterlife in history, literature, film, art, and popular culture. They unravel the complexities surrounding it by confronting a history of exploitation, contradictions, and misunderstandings. The book also features conversations with influential cultural figures in Taiwan who have attempted to tell the story of the uprising.
ENGLISH

Politics And Cultural Nativism In 1970s Taiwan - Youth, Narrative, Nationalism

by A-Chin Hsiau

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island—officially known as the Republic of China—was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan. Offering bracing new perspectives on nationalism, democratization, and identity in Taiwan, this book has significant implications spanning sociology, history, political science, and East Asian studies.
ENGLISH

Art Of Useless - Fashion, Media, And Consumer Culture In Contemporary China

by Calvin Hui

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible. A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.
ENGLISH

Photo Poetics - Chinese Lyricism And Modern Media Culture

by Shengqing Wu

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Chinese poetry has a long history of interaction with the visual arts. Classical aesthetic thought held that painting, calligraphy, and poetry were cross-fertilizing and mutually enriching. What happened when the Chinese poetic tradition encountered photography, a transformative technology and presumably realistic medium that reshaped seeing and representing the world? Shengqing Wu explores how the new medium of photography was transformed by Chinese aesthetic culture. She details the complex negotiations between poetry and photography in the late Qing and early Republican eras, examining the ways traditional textual forms collaborated with the new visual culture. Drawing on extensive archival research into illustrated magazines, poetry collections, and vintage photographs, Photo Poetics analyzes a wide range of practices and genres, including self-representation in portrait photography; gifts of inscribed photographs; mass-media circulation of images of beautiful women; and photography of ghosts, immortals, and imagined landscapes. Wu argues that the Chinese lyrical tradition provided rich resources for artistic creativity, self-expression, and embodied experience in the face of an increasingly technological and image-oriented society. An interdisciplinary study spanning literary studies, visual culture, and media history, Photo Poetics is an original account of media culture in early twentieth-century China and the formation of Chinese literary and visual modernities.
ENGLISH

Minjian - The Rise Of China’S Grassroots Intellectuals

by Sebastian Veg

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati or pronouncing on democracy and modernity like 1980s public intellectuals, they derive legitimacy from their work with the vulnerable and the marginalized, often proclaiming their independence with a heavy dose of anti-elitist rhetoric. They are proudly minjian—unofficial, unaffiliated, and among the people. In this book, Sebastian Veg explores the rise of minjian intellectuals and how they have profoundly transformed China’s public culture. An intellectual history of contemporary China, Minjian documents how, amid deep structural shifts, grassroots thinker-activists began to work outside academia or policy institutions in an embryonic public sphere. Veg explores the work of amateur historians who question official accounts, independent documentarians who let ordinary people speak for themselves, and grassroots lawyers and NGO workers who spread practical knowledge. Their interventions are specific rather than universal, with a focus on concrete problems among disenfranchised populations such as victims of Maoism, migrant workers and others without residence permits, and petitioners. Drawing on careful analysis of public texts by grassroots intellectuals and the networks and publics among which they circulate, Minjian is a groundbreaking transdisciplinary exploration of crucial trends developing under the surface of contemporary Chinese society.
ENGLISH

Transpacific Attachments - Sex Work, Media Networks, And Affective Histories Of Chineseness

by Lily Wong

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War-era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. "Chineseness," the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.
ENGLISH

Internet Literature In China

by Michel Hockx

72,86€ + 10% CARD

 Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions.
ENGLISH

Shanghai Homes - Palimpsests Of Private Life

by Jie Li

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 In a book that is part microhistory, part memoir, Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who witnessed spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories. Exploring three dimensions of private life--territories, artifacts, and gossip--Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century.
ENGLISH

Beyond Sinology - Chinese Writing And The Scripts Of Culture

by Andrea Bachner

105,99€ + 10% CARD

 New communication and information technologies provide distinct challenges and possibilities for the Chinese script, which, unlike alphabetic or other phonetic scripts, relies on multiple signifying principles. In recent decades, this multiplicity has generated a rich corpus of reflection and experimentation in literature, film, visual and performance art, and design and architecture, within both China and different parts of the West. Approaching this history from a variety of alternative theoretical perspectives, Beyond Sinology reflects on the Chinese script to pinpoint the multiple connections between languages, scripts, and medial expressions and cultural and national identities. Through a complex study of intercultural representations, exchanges, and tensions, the text focuses on the concrete "scripting" of identity and alterity, advancing a new understanding of the links between identity and medium and a critique of articulations that rely on single, monolithic, and univocal definitions of writing. Chinese writing—with its history of divergent readings in Chinese and non-Chinese contexts, with its current reinvention in the age of new media and globalization—can teach us how to read and construct mediality and cultural identity in interculturally responsible ways and also how to scrutinize, critique, and yet appreciate and enjoy the powerful multi-medial creativity embodied in writing.
ENGLISH

Sinophone Studies - A Critical Reader

59,61€ + 10% CARD

 This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond "China proper," it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.
ENGLISH

Chinese Shakespeares - Two Centuries Of Cultural Exchange

by Alexa Huang

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun''s search for a Chinese "Shakespeare," and from Feng Xiaogang''s martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture. Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare''s appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of "China" and "Shakespeare" in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In her critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.
ENGLISH

Representing Atrocity In Taiwan - The 2/28 Incident And White Terror In Fiction And Film

by Sylvia Li-Chun Lin

99,36€ + 10% CARD

 Drawing on secondary theoretical material as well as her own original research, the author conducts an analysis of the political, narrative, and ideological structures involved in the fictional and cinematic representations of the 2/28 Incident and White Terror.
ENGLISH

History Of Pain - Trauma In Modern Chinese Literature And Film

by Michael Berry

52,99€ + 10% CARD

 Michael Berry takes an innovative look at the representation of six specific historical traumas in modern Chinese history: the Musha Incident (1930), the Rape of Nanjing (1937-38), the February 28 Incident (1947), the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Tiananmen Square (1989), and the Handover of Hong Kong (1997). He identifies two primary modes of restaging historical violence: centripetal trauma, or violence inflicted from the outside inspiring a reexamination of the Chinese nation, and centrifugal trauma, which originates from within and inspires traumatic narratives projected out onto a transnational vision of global dreams and, sometimes, nightmares. These modes enable Berry to connect portrayals of mass violence to ideas of modernity and the nation. He also illuminates the relationship between historical atrocity on a national scale and the pain experienced by the individual, the function of film and literature as historical testimony, the intersection between politics and art and history and memory, and the particular advantages of modern media, which have discovered new means of narrating the burden of historical violence. As Chinese artists began to probe previously taboo aspects of their nation's history in the final decades of the twentieth century, they created texts that prefigured, echoed, or subverted social, political, and cultural trends. Films such as Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness and Lou Ye's Summer Palace and novels such as Ye Zhaoyan's Nanjing 1937: A Love Story and Wang Xiaobo's The Golden Age collectively reimagine past horrors and give rise to new historical narratives. A History of Pain acknowledges the far-reaching influence of this art and its profound role in shaping the public imagination and conception--as well as misconception--of modern Chinese history.
ENGLISH

Speaking In Images - Interviews With Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers

by Michael (Book Review Editor, Modern Chinese Literature & Culture) Berry

51,37€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Offers a collection of interviews with the directors who have changed the face of Chinese and international cinema. This book includes discussions with such directors as Ang Lee ("Crouching Tiger", "Hidden Dragon"), Zhang Yimou ("Hero"), Chen Kaige ("Farewell My Concubine"), Stanley Kwan ("Lan Yu"), and Tsai Ming-Liang ("Vive l'Amour").
ENGLISH

Sinophone Studies - A Critical Reader

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE
ENGLISH

Autoimmune Cookbook

by Dorling Kindersley

29,90€

AVAILABLE

 Can a diet really heal? Do you want to boost your immune system? This title presents tasty, everyday recipes that follow the autoimmune protocol (AIP). Whether you have coeliac disease, arthritis, food allergies, or one of the dozens of other autoimmune conditions, or even if you just want some immune system boosters, It is for you.
Loading results...

View more results