Rey Chow. Ethics after idealism : theory-culture-ethnicity-reading; Xudong Zhang. Chinese modernism in the era of reforms : cultural fever, avant-garde fiction and the new Chinese cinema

This article reviews the books Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading written by Rey Chow and Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction and the New Chinese Cinema written by Xudong Zhang

Follow the Yellow Brick Road:The passeur, the gatekeeper, and the young migrant filmmaker

In the first part of this article, I reflect on my experience of making filmmaking workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema. I then set my approach to these workshops in the context of Alain Bergala’s ideas about film education, of which I had initially been unaware. In discussing a couple of further workshops that I ran in the UK and Australia as part of the Cinéma: cent ans de jeunesse programme, I focus particularly on the benign or obstructive role of institutional gatekeepers, who act as intermediaries or agents determining the terms of access to children and young people for film educators, researchers and practitioners. The legal, protective and ethical dimensions of the relationship between educator, gatekeeper and participating students are discussed. I cite cases in which the interaction worked well and others in which it proved problematic. The functions, responsibilities and potential drawbacks of gatekeepers are compared with Bergala’s conception of the pedagogic role of the passeur – a figure who also holds power in relation to young peoples’ access to film and film-making, but one that connotes positive, even magical propertie

Working in the Space Between

All of the contributors to this special issue have reflected on the stakes involved in negotiating differences in language and culture. In their research and professional practice they inhabit the ‘space between’: the space between languages, the space between cultures, and the space between academic disciplines. While many of our contributors are located in the Australian university system, we also have contributors from outside that system, as well as contributors who are theorising disparate sites for the negotiation of difference. The most exciting aspect of the papers presented here is the ability to move between the spheres of cultural theory and the everyday. Analytical techniques originally developed for literary and cultural analysis are brought to bear on the texts and practices of everyday life. The loci for these investigations include the classroom, the police station, the streets, local government and the university itself. The practices examined include translating and interpreting, language teaching, academic writing, literary production and critique, language planning and small business and shadow economies. The academic disciplines drawn on include theoretical and applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching pedagogy, policy studies, cultural studies, literary studies, political science, gender studies and postcolonial theory

Introduction. Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu: Class Culture in Contemporary China

This special issue of Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies explores the relationship between taste, choice and social stratification in contemporary China. It is premised on the observation that the past thirty years of accelerated Reform policies have initiated a system of authoritarian capitalism, which fosters a network of social values, focussed on opportunity and struggle figured through financial achievement and consumption, and given affective meaning through nationalism. Not all Chinese enjoy the full gamut of these experiences, although most partake in struggle in some form. Opportunity arises mainly from the cultural capital, financial and social position of one’s parents, and, to some degree, from innate talent and hard work, an urban upbringing, and national provisions for educational advantage. Pre-existing forms of influence and power—local networks, Party membership, sufficient funds for education—are the strongest determinants of sustained success. In some cases, the opportunity for wealth creation has allowed some social mobility for entrepreneurial minds, whilst also re-establishing privilege amongst those whose status was already high through long term political or intellectual activity

Green Hell: Detention, art, and activism in an English landscape

This paper revolves on the carceral practices of Morton Hall IRC (Immigration Removal Centre) and of the role of visual imagery in the campaigns against them. Morton Hall is located in Lincolnshire, a rural county in England with a long history of agricultural innovation. It observes and debates a sense of the dissonance between institution and location that Morton Hall shared with Manus Island in the Pacific, the site of another postcolonial prison camp also in a beautiful setting. We interrogate how the legacies of British colonialism in the Pacific might help to explain that shared incongruity between function and place. We discuss a public initiative that aimed to give artistic and activist expression to these insights by highlighting the physical, historical, and emotional connections between Lincoln, the surrounding countryside, and the IRC. The aim of this planned event, The Big Walk, was to show that there is no absolute spatial disconnect between places of incarceration and places of freedom. In describing and analysing the cultural legacy of the planned event, curtailed by the 2020 pandemic, we draw on the wider oeuvre of British-Croatian artist, Natasha Davis, which include a film (2020) commissioned to replace the Walk and yet draw attention to the landscape as layered by time and memory, a landscape that yields ups a cross-temporal narrative spored beneat

Refugee filmmaking: Editorial

The origins of this issue of Alphaville lie in collaborations between the Forced Migration Research Network (UNSW – University of New South Wales) and the Refugee Council of Australia, and in the inspiration afforded us by international colleagues and guests to Sydney (Fadma Aït Mous), Liverpool (Dennis Del Favero) and Lincoln (Hoda Afshar) universities. We have benefited from these academic alliances and invitations, but we also embrace the widest notion of hospitality, whereby the moment of arrival, the request for assistance and shelter, and subsequent decisions over citizenship and long-term residency are located in a moral environment of welcome and mutual learning. We trace and acknowledge our intellectual relationships here in so far as they have allowed us to articulate an emerging and shared recognition that refugee lived experience stands as the barometer for political civility and social health in our time

Debt, the migrant and the refugee: Lampedusa on stage

This article discusses Anders Lustgarten’s play, Lampedusa. The play is ostensibly about refugees and the Mediterranean crossing, as well as addressing EU migration, debt, and austerity. The article develops the idea of the debtor in neo-liberal economics suggesting that the refugee is required to become a debtor on settlement. While Lustgarten’s representation of refugees and migrants is not fully realised in that they are not enabled agents in the script or in performance, the article concludes that although the play is thus flawed, its characters’ search for moral restitution creates a thoughtful insight into British society and grounds for hope

Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptua- lised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or con- structs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s

Childhood and nation in contemporary world cinema : borders and encounters

xv, 273 p. ; 24 cm

The State of China Atlas

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