Author: Meng Yue
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Keywords: empires, edges, shanghai
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 2006-06-14
List price: $75.00
ISBN-10: 0816644128
ISBN-13: 9780816644124

Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from China’s heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and Shanghai’s early twentieth-century rise, the overlapping cultural edges of a failing Chinese royal order and the encroachment of Western imperialists converged. Simultaneously appropriating and resisting imposing forces, Shanghai opened itself to unruly

Author: Scott Nygren
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Keywords: unfolding, history, cinema, japanese, frames, time
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 2007-03-14
List price: $25.00
ISBN-10: 0816647089
ISBN-13: 9780816647088

Until 1951, when Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, Japanese cinema was isolated from world distribution and the international discourse on film. After this historic event, however, Japanese cinema could no longer be ignored. In Time Frames, Scott Nygren explores how Japanese film criticism and history has been written both within and beyond Japan, before and after Rashomon. He takes up the central question of which, and whose, Japan do critics and historians mean when reviewing the country’s cinema—an issue complicated

Author: Alisa S. Lebow
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Keywords: evidence, visible, jewish, person, first
Number of Pages: 224
Published: 2008-06-18
List price: $67.50
ISBN-10: 0816643547
ISBN-13: 9780816643547

Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, using it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community. In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing