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Body and Face in Chinese Visual Culture
Traditionally the "Chinese body" was approached as a totality and explained by sweeping comparisons of the differences that distinguished Chinese examples from their Western counterparts. Recently, scholars have argued that we must look at particular examples of Chinese images of the body and explore their intrinsic conceptual complexity and historical specificity. The twelve contributors to this volume adopt a middle position. They agree that Chinese images are conditioned by indigenous traditions and dynamics of social interaction, but they seek to explain a general Chinese body and face by charting multiple, specific bodies and faces. All of the chapters are historical case studies and investigate particular images, such as Han dynasty tomb figurines; Buddhist texts and illustrations; pictures of deprivation, illness, deformity, and ghosts; clothing; formal portraiture; and modern photographs and films. From the diversity of art forms and historical periods studied, there emerges a more complex picture of ways that the visual culture of the body and face in China has served to depict the living, memorialize the dead, and present the unrepresentable in art.
Rakugo
Rakugo is the traditional Japanese art of storytelling. The stories are also called rakugo, or hanashi, and they are performed by professional narrators called rakugoka or hanashika. The customary place where rakugo stories are told is the vaudeville-type variety called the yose. This book is divided into three parts, including nine chapters and an epilogue, and also includes notes, three appendices, a bibliography, glossary, and index.
The Naked Gaze
This is a study of visuality in early modern and modern China. Its focus, however, is not so much on imagery per se but rather on how vision itself has been conceived, imagined, and deployed in a variety of discursive contexts. Of particular interest is how these discourses of vision have been used to articulate issues of gender and desire, and specifically processes of gendered subject formation. Through detailed readings of narrative works by eight authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—ranging from the canonical to the popular to the esoteric—the study identifies three distinct constellations of visual concerns corresponding to the late imperial, mid-twentieth century, and contemporary periods, respectively. At the same time, however, it argues that those historical periodizations themselves do not reflect a smooth, unidirectional temporal movement; rather, they are the result of a complex process of retrospection and anticipatory projection. The goal of this volume is to use a focus on tropes of visuality and gender to reflect on shifting understandings of the significance of Chineseness, modernity, and Chinese modernity.
Muslim Chinese
This second edition of Dru Gladney's critically acclaimed study of the Muslim population in China includes a new preface by the author, as well as a valuable addendum to the bibliography, already hailed as one of the most extensive listing of modern sources on the Sino-Muslims.
Monstrous Bodies
Monstrous Bodies is a cultural and literary history of ambiguous bodies in imperial Japan. It focuses on what the book calls modern monsters—doppelgangers, robots, twins, hybrid creations—bodily metaphors that became ubiquitous in the literary landscape from the Meiji era (1868–1912) up until the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War in 1937. Such monsters have often been understood as representations of the premodern past or of “stigmatized others”—figures subversive to national ideologies. Miri Nakamura contends instead that these monsters were products of modernity, informed by the newly imported scientific discourses on the body, and that they can be read as being complicit in the ideologies of the empire, for they are uncanny bodies that ignite a sense of terror by blurring the binary of “normal” and “abnormal” that modern sciences like eugenics and psychology created. Reading these literary bodies against the historical rise of the Japanese empire and its colonial wars in Asia, Nakamura argues that they must be understood in relation to the most “monstrous” body of all in modern Japan: the carefully constructed image of the empire itself.
The Problem of Beauty
"The intense piety of late T’ang essays on Buddhism by literati has helped earn the T’ang its title of the “golden age of Chinese Buddhism.” In contrast, the Sung is often seen as an age in which the literati distanced themselves from Buddhism. This study of Sung devotional texts shows, however, that many literati participated in intra-Buddhist debates. Others were drawn to Buddhism because of its power, which found expression and reinforcement in its ties with the state. For some, monasteries were extravagant houses of worship that reflected the corruption of the age; for others, the sacrifice and industry demanded by such projects were exemplars worthy of emulation. Finally, Buddhi...
Proving the Way
"Kokugaku, or nativism, was one of the most important intellectual movements from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century in Japan, and its worldview continues to be influential today. This scholarly endeavor represented an attempt to use Japanese antiquity to revitalize what many saw as a society in decline. One important figure in this movement was Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843), a center of controversy in his own lifetime. Even though Atsutane’s version of nativism came to be the standard form, many modern scholars dismiss him because of his scholarly shortcomings. The primary goal of this book is to restore historicity to the study of nativism by recognizing Atsutane’s role in th...
The Proletarian Wave
"Socialist doctrines had an important influence on Korean writers and intellectuals of the early twentieth century. From the 1910s through the 1940s, a veritable wave of anarchist, Marxist, nationalist, and feminist leftist groups swept the cultural scene with differing agendas as well as shared demands for equality and social justice. In The Proletarian Wave, Sunyoung Park reconstructs the complex mosaic of colonial leftist culture by focusing on literature as its most fertile and enduring expression. The book combines a general overview of the literary left with the intellectual portraits of four writers whose works exemplify the stylistic range and colonial inflection of socialist culture...
Islands of Eight Million Smiles
" Since the late 1960s a ubiquitous feature of popular culture in Japan has been the ""idol,"" an attractive young actor, male or female, packaged and promoted as an adolescent role model and exploited by the entertainment, fashion, cosmetic, and publishing industries to market trendy products. This book offers ethnographic case studies regarding the symbolic qualities of idols and how these qualities relate to the conceptualization of selfhood among adolescents in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. The author explores how the idol-manufacturing industry absorbs young people into its system of production, molds them into marketable personalities, commercializes their images, and contributes t...
The Japanization of Modernity
"Murakami Haruki is perhaps the best-known and most widely translated Japanese author of his generation. Despite Murakami’s critical and commercial success, particularly in the United States, his role as a mediator between Japanese and American literature and culture is seldom discussed. Bringing a comparative perspective to the study of Murakami’s fiction, Rebecca Suter complicates our understanding of the author’s oeuvre and highlights his contributions not only as a popular writer but also as a cultural critic on both sides of the Pacific. Suter concentrates on Murakami’s short stories—less known in the West but equally worthy of critical attention—as sites of some of the auth...
