scholarly journals The Hero Fallen: Zhang Yimou and the Question of Unstable Authorship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Ellsworth
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
National Politics ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Authenticity ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
The Way

<p>When Zhang Yimou’s film, Hero (2002), was released it was one of the most successful Chinese films ever screened in American theaters. While many critics applauded the film’s aesthetics, other reviewers condemned the film for undermining the political potency of Zhang’s early films and promoting a fascist ideology. The interpretation of Hero as fascist propaganda has incited a controversy over the reception of the film that has penetrated academic as well as journalistic circles. A close look at this controversy reveals that there has been a tendency in the West to read a film and filmmaker in a manner predetermined by where they are from and the discourse that already exists. This ‘auto-reading’ or ‘auto-positioning’ tendency is symptomatic of a reliance on discourses of authorship and national cinema. The manner in which these discourses have permeated the way that the West has responded to Zhang and his films has given rise to three ‘recurring motifs:’ aesthetic virtuosity, cultural authenticity, and national politics. These motifs are characteristics which have been repeated so often that they became defining qualities of his authorship and have often determined the interpretation of his films. This thesis involves a mapping of the critical reception of Hero and the way it relates to Zhang’s prior work, his auteur status, and his relationship to the Chinese nation-state. Specifically, this thesis examines how the discursive reception of Zhang’s career and films provided the context out of which emerged the framework that justifies reading the film as fascist. Tracing the recurring motifs throughout the Western reception of Zhang’s films reveals the problematics of the reliance on the discourses of authorship and national cinema. This thesis will also explore Hero directly to investigate how the film’s ambiguities have contributed to the reading of the film as fascist but also how ambiguity facilitates the potential to interpret other meanings in the film.</p>

scholarly journals The Hero Fallen: Zhang Yimou and the Question of Unstable Authorship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Ellsworth
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
National Politics ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Authenticity ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
The Way

<p>When Zhang Yimou’s film, Hero (2002), was released it was one of the most successful Chinese films ever screened in American theaters. While many critics applauded the film’s aesthetics, other reviewers condemned the film for undermining the political potency of Zhang’s early films and promoting a fascist ideology. The interpretation of Hero as fascist propaganda has incited a controversy over the reception of the film that has penetrated academic as well as journalistic circles. A close look at this controversy reveals that there has been a tendency in the West to read a film and filmmaker in a manner predetermined by where they are from and the discourse that already exists. This ‘auto-reading’ or ‘auto-positioning’ tendency is symptomatic of a reliance on discourses of authorship and national cinema. The manner in which these discourses have permeated the way that the West has responded to Zhang and his films has given rise to three ‘recurring motifs:’ aesthetic virtuosity, cultural authenticity, and national politics. These motifs are characteristics which have been repeated so often that they became defining qualities of his authorship and have often determined the interpretation of his films. This thesis involves a mapping of the critical reception of Hero and the way it relates to Zhang’s prior work, his auteur status, and his relationship to the Chinese nation-state. Specifically, this thesis examines how the discursive reception of Zhang’s career and films provided the context out of which emerged the framework that justifies reading the film as fascist. Tracing the recurring motifs throughout the Western reception of Zhang’s films reveals the problematics of the reliance on the discourses of authorship and national cinema. This thesis will also explore Hero directly to investigate how the film’s ambiguities have contributed to the reading of the film as fascist but also how ambiguity facilitates the potential to interpret other meanings in the film.</p>

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dmitry Shumsky
Keyword(s):  
State Solution ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National State ◽  
National Group ◽  
National Movement ◽  
Left Base ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter discusses the unquestioned identification between “Zionism” as a national movement that sought to realize the Jewish nation's self-determination in Palestine, and “the Jewish nation-state,” which has no room for the national collective existence of any particular national group other than the Jews and which represents the ultimate and teleological realization of the Zionist project. The vast majority of those who support the two-state solution, who are known as the “Zionist left,” base their position on the need to avoid the formation of a binational state in which the Jewish demographic majority would be endangered. They argue that this is the way to rescue what they consider to be the political core of the Zionist idea: a mono-national state for the Jewish political collective.

Russia and the West

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Lovell
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
State System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
National Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
The 1950S

Concentrating on the political and cultural capital that various elites have extracted from notions of the West, this chapter identifies four phases in the development of the most consistently articulated binary opposition in modern Russian culture: Russia’s entry into the European state system in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the era of national awakening from the Napoleonic wars to the 1860s; the era of mass national politics and decolonization from the 1860s to the 1950s; and the era of American hegemony, globalization and European peace from the 1950s onwards which has eventually caused the Russian nation to reinvent itself in a postcommunist guise.

Shintō Shrines and Secularism in Modern Japan, 1890–1945

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-156
Author(s):  
Karli Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Secular Institution ◽  
The Government ◽  
Academic Discourses

From the late eighteenth century to WWII, shrine Shintō came to be seen as a secular institution by the government, academics, and activists in Japan (Isomae 2014; Josephson 2012, Maxey 2014). However, research thus far has largely focused on the political and academic discourses surrounding the development of this idea. This article contributes to this discussion by examining how a prominent modern Shintō shrine, Kashihara Jingū founded in 1890, was conceived of and treated as secular. It also explores how Kashihara Jingū communicated an alternate sense of space and time in line with a new Japanese secularity. This Shintō-based secularity, which located shrines as public, historical, and modern, was formulated in antagonism to the West and had an influence that extended across the Japanese sphere. The shrine also serves as a case study of how the modern political system of secularism functioned in a non-western nation-state.

Containing the Crisis: Japan's Diplomatic Offensive in the West, 1931–33

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-372
Author(s):  
Sandra Wilson
Keyword(s):  
League Of Nations ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
The Way

Japan's departure from the League of Nations in 1933 over the Manchurian issue has often been portrayed as an act of national self assertiveness signifying a willingness to defy international opinion and pursue an independent course in world affairs. The physical act by Matsuoka Yosuke and his delegation of walking out of the League Assembly on 24 February promotes an image of a firm and uncompromising attitude on the part of Japan; and as time passed, the interpretation recorded in 1944 by Joseph Grew, US Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1942, became a standard one: ‘Nobody could miss the political significance of Japan's decision to quit the League of Nations. It marked a clear break with the Western powers and prepared the way for Japan's later adherence to the Axis’.

From outside the Imperium: Gandhi's Cultural Critique of the ‘West’

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashis Nandy
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Equitable Distribution ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Shifting Baseline ◽  
Modern Nation State

Gandhi considered the cultural gap between the modern and the non-modern cultures deeper than that between the West and the East. It is the modern culture he rejected, not only as a social ideal, but also as a framework within which one could struggle for an equitable distribution of the products of modernity. Thus, to him, the demonic aspects of the modern Western culture did not centre around only the political economy of modernity, but also around modern West's scientific secularism, technologism, overorganization, ideologies of adulthood and masculinity, giganticism, stress on normality and oversocialization, and cultural evolutionism. Such a critique allowed Gandhi to see the West as a differentiated structure and the Western man as a co-victim of the oppression of the modern nation-state system, centralized economy, mass media and technocracy, and an ethic which was openly ethnocidal. Traditional cultures also were not undifferentiated to him. He was a critical traditionalist, not an uncritical defender of faiths, and he believed in ‘negative’ relativism, not in the anthropologist's version of cultural relativism. No culture could be perfect in his model, not even a traditional one; it could only be useful as a shifting baseline for cultural criticism.

The War of “Who Is Who”: Autochthony, Nationalism, and Citizenship in the Ivoirian Crisis

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Marshall-Fratani
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
The West ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ways Of Life

Abstract:Over the past four years the Ivoirian crisis has seen as its central dynamic the mobilization of the categories of autochthony and territorialized belonging in an ultranationalist discourse vehicled by the party in power. More than just a struggle to the death for state power, the conflict involves the redefinition of the content of citizenship and the conditions of sovereignty. The explosion of violence and counterviolence provoked and legitimated by the mobilization of these categories does not necessarily signify either the triumph of those monolithic identities “engineered” during the colonial occupation, nor the disintegration of the nation-state in the context of globalization. The Ivoirian case shows the continued vitality of the nation-state: not only as the principal space in terms of which discourses of authochtony are constructed, but also in terms of the techniques and categories that the political practice of autochthony puts into play. While in some senses the Ivoirian conflict appears to be a war without borders—in particular with the “spillover” of the Liberian war in the west during 2003—it is above all a war about borders, crystallizing in liminal spaces and social categories and on emerging practices and ways of life.

The Parallax Worlds of the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra

2009 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Beckles Willson
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Classical Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Identities ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Way

The West–Eastern Divan Orchestra – founded in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim with the support of Edward W. Said in response to the Israel–Palestine conflict – brings together young Arabs, Jews and Spaniards for a workshop and concert tour every year. It displays a tension between repertoire (exclusively the Western classical tradition) and marketing (as an expression of inter-cultural dialogue). Drawing on fieldwork from 2006, the article analyses this tension as it evolves for players who shift repeatedly between the demands of Western orchestral playing and political discussion. It exposes the way the hierarchy of musical roles and the discourse elaborated around them create an environment that erases the political identities of players; and discusses the ways in which this environment is punctured at certain moments by a discursive or practical intervention, causing political allegiances to rise back to the surface explosively (only to be subsumed once again into music). Although the orchestra is set up to oppose the violence of war in the Middle East, it can be seen to contain its own disconcertingly coercive regime, one emerging from its hierarchical constitution with Barenboim as omnipotent leader, the professional ambitions of players, and the power that music can have in confounding the conceptual sphere.

scholarly journals Η ΘΕΩΡΗΣΗ ΤΟΥ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΟΥ ΣΥΣΤΗΜΑΤΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΙΤΑΛΙΚΩΝ ΚΡΑΤΙΔΙΩΝ (Α' ΜΙΣΟ ΤΟΥ 15ου ΑΙΩΝΑ) ΑΠΟ ΤΟΝ ΛΑΟΝΙΚΟ ΧΑΛΚΟΚΟΝΔΥΛΗ

2003 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 69
Author(s):  
ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΟΣ Κ. ΠΑΝΝΑΚΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Special Importance ◽  
The West ◽  
Basic Part ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Italian Peninsula ◽  
City States ◽  
The Way

The Laonikos Chalkokondyles' historical work refers extensively to the socialand political situation of western-european populations in the late medieval era. Thedescription of the Italian peninsula as a geopolitical unity has a main position in thisnarration.This article tries to underpin the special importance, which Laonikos Chalkokondylesattached to the description of the political situation of the Italian cities-states.Apart from this, it makes an effort to document this historiographical selection.Chalkokondyles of course keeps systematically a distance from the events.However, the way that was used by one of the last Byzantine historians in order tomaintain the political system of Italian cities, proves his strong interest about it. Thisinterest is revealed by having a critic spirit and highlighting the possitive sides ofeach regime. It is, also, revealed by expounding at great length. It is significant thatthose features didn't exist in his references to the other european societies.The structure used in this topic is the following:The basic part is an annotation to Chalkokondyles' references regarding thepolitical organisation in the main four city-states, Venice, Genoa, Florence and Milan.The topic is framed by two introductive chapters and conclusions as an epilogue. In thechapters mentioned, Chalkokondyles is incorporated in his contemporary backround.In the same part the Italian urban milieux on the borderline of 14th and 15th centuriesis basicaly described.In the conclusions the central aspect that runs through the way of theChalkokondylean descriptions of Italian cities, is restructed. It is also undertaken toexplain this way from the political view of the historian and his relationship with thatgroup of Despotate of Morea which was friendly to the West.

The Schema of the West and the Apparatus of Capture: Variations on Deleuze and Guattari

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Walker
Keyword(s):  
Social Relation ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The West ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
The Way

Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an existing supposedly ‘non-Western’ territory or ‘substance’, but rather as a ‘line of flight’ beyond the nation-state, the form in which the ‘original division’ and creation of the social relation called ‘the West’ continues to (re)produce itself. They thus demonstrate that the way out of the Eurocentric epistemological order lies precisely in clarifying how ‘the West’ was created as an effect of the capitalist axiomatic and maintained by the repetition of this paradoxical ‘commencement’ in the form of the ‘anthropological difference’, congealed into the modern nation-state. In the pursuit of this moment, we will investigate the question of how the social surface is territorialised and enclosed for capitalist accumulation, how the purely heterogeneous topology of the social comes to be inscribed with the traces of the apparatus of capture.

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