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The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas

Online ISBN:
9780199983315
Print ISBN:
9780199765607
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas

Carlos Rojas (ed.)
Carlos Rojas
(ed.)
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University
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Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University, and his research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, nationalism and diaspora studies. He is the author of The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Harvard University Press, 2010) and The Naked Gaze: Reflections on Chinese Modernity (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008). He is the co-editor, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, of Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon (Routledge: 2009) and, with David Der-wei Wang, of Writing Taiwan: A New Literary History (Duke University Press, 2007). He is also the translator of Yan Lianke’s novel Lenin’s Kisses, and the co-translator, again with Eileen Chow, of Yu Hua’s two-volume novel, Brothers (Pantheon, 2009).

Published online:
1 October 2013
Published in print:
11 April 2013
Online ISBN:
9780199983315
Print ISBN:
9780199765607
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This volume brings together innovative analyses covering a wide range of issues relating to Chinese cinemas. The volume is divided into three parts, focusing respectively on historical periodizations, categories that share formal characteristics, and structural elements involved in the production, distribution, and reception of the works themselves. In historical terms, topics range from the birth of Chinese cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century to the present moment, and include discussions of several periods that have hitherto not yet received much detailed analysis—including Manchurian cinema from the 1930s and 1940s, and Mainland Chinese cinema from the Maoist period. In formal terms, topics range from familiar cinematic genres such as the opera film and the war film, to newer techno-formal configurations such as small-screen and large-screen cinemas. In structural terms, topics range acting and directing to the practices of reenactments and remakes. Neither the volume as a whole, its three main parts, nor any of its individual chapters pretends to present an encyclopedic overview of its corresponding topic. Instead, our objective is to explore the interpretive spaces that open up at the interstices of various existing conceptions of the shape of the field. It is here, we contend, that we may find the key to a richer understanding not only of a singular “Chinese cinema,” but more importantly of an eclectic body of mutually overlapping Chinese cinemas.

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