Chinese Rock ‘n’ Roll Film and Cui Jian on Screen

Author(s):  
Ying Xiao

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. During the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced an explosion of films for youth, imbued with the aesthetic and ethic of rock ‘n’ roll. This chapter examines a variety of films, from the countercultural to the more mainstream, focusing on the voice, image, persona, and iconography of Cui Jian, and offering an audiovisual perspective on urban youth cinema and Chinese rock. The emergence and development of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film from the late 1980s to the twenty-first century resulted from widespread, multifaceted transformations in postsocialist China. At the core of this rock imaginary is the aesthetic of cinema vérité and postsocialist realism. In sync with the kaleidoscopic manifestation of the cityscape and long tracking shots of protagonists roaming the metropolis, rock music and the hand-held mobile camera seek to document a reality of postmodern life and capture a feeling of postsocialist anxiety-a concern for realism articulated through dialogue and ambient sound.

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.


Author(s):  
Nathan Brown

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.


2020 ◽  
pp. 487-488

Although Appalachia and its authors resist political definition and economic category, one can say that twenty-first century Appalachian writers attempt to define what changes and what endures in a rapidly globalizing world. As Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning has noted, at the core of Appalachian literature is a tension between an appreciation of the region and an “anxiety for legitimacy”; this observation reflects the challenges facing authors from a region still often seen as “other” by the broader American culture. Some contemporary Appalachian authors explore which traditions are worth preserving and which ones should fall by the wayside, while others consider how to preserve and expand their Appalachian identity, a process that they sometimes connect with preservation and innovation in literary style. In short, many twentieth-century Appalachian authors cultivate in their readers an appreciation of Appalachian perspectives from a self-aware otherness that is sometimes tradition tethered yet is willing to go far beyond received notions about the region.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Claudia Milian

At the core of this Cultural Dynamics special issue on “LatinX Studies: Variations and Velocities” are new conceptual approaches, epistemological workings, “keywords,” and modes of inquiry that enable us to theorize LatinX Studies and global LatinXness for the twenty-first century. Bringing together different research communities from art, art history, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, journalism, and literature, this exploratory undertaking offers a working language on present-day LatinX preoccupations to seize what is happening contemporaneously in light of the field’s “X” and to disseminate it in a usable format like this journal. The volume’s contributors—Jill Anderson, Gloria Elizabeth Chacón, Nicholas De Genova, María DeGuzmán, Rene Galvan, Hilda Lloréns and Maritza Stanchich, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, and Fredo Rivera—put forward new formulations and models for Latino/a Studies in considering LatinX geographies beyond the Americas; indigenous migrations and cultural production; Miami’s oceanic borderlands; environmental planetary problems and environmental knowledges; LatinX medical subjects; and deported exiles. The breadth of foci herein invites further problematization and dialogue with implications and relevance to other fields.


2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Imbroscio

A strong and enduring commitment to liberalism marks much of urban policy discourse in the United States. Although this Liberal Urban Policy compares favorably with its neoliberal and neoconservative rivals, it is nevertheless deeply flawed. One particularly serious problem is its strong commitment to rationalism. I offer a critique of this Rationalist Paradigm at the core of Liberal Urban Policy, which is extensively developed along both normative and empirical dimensions. In light of this critique, I conclude by gesturing toward a possible alternative—an Organic Paradigm—that might conceivably serve as a superior foundation for American urban policy in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Hannah Lauren Murray

This chapter examines the state of the field of Charles Brockden Brown studies since 2000. Taking a thematic approach, I discuss four dominant strands in twenty-first-century criticism: geographies, medical humanities, economies, and aesthetics. These sections cover the scholarly debate over a transnational, imperial, or postcolonial Brown; consider the new ways in which early national medicine intersects with his fiction; chart the rise of market and class-based criticism; and discuss a return to formal concerns in light of the aesthetic or postcritique turn. The final section of this chapter looks ahead to emergent trends in future Brown scholarship in response to the previous decade’s work.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Ross Allan Sempek

With government machinations, scandals, and conflict bombarding our American consciousness, it’s easy to overlook the core of our country’s identity: the US Constitution. The first three words of this dearly regarded text remind us that we are the constituents who fulfill the ideals of this document. We the People are the progressive catalyst this country needs to realize the lofty ideals of our Constitution.


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