scholarly journals From Mulan (1998) to Mulan (2020): Disney Conventions, Cross-Cultural Feminist Intervention, and a Compromised Progress

Arts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Zhuoyi Wang
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Cultural Appropriateness ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Monetary Success ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Live Action

Directed by the feminist filmmaker Niki Caro, Disney’s 2020 live-action remake of Mulan (1998) strove to be a more gender progressive, culturally appropriate, and internationally successful adaptation of the Chinese legend of Mulan than the animated original. Contrary to the film’s intended effect, however, it was a critical and financial letdown. The film was criticized for a wide range of issues, including making unpopular changes to the animated original, misrepresenting Chinese culture and history, perpetuating Orientalist stereotypes, and demonizing Inner Asian steppe nomads. In addition, the film also faced boycott calls amid political controversies surrounding China. It received exceptionally low audience ratings in both the US and China, grossing a total well under its estimated budget. This article argues that Mulan (2020) is not, as many believe, just another Disney film suffering from simple artistic inability, cultural insensitivity, or political injustice, but a window into the tension-ridden intersectionality of the gender, sexual, racial, cultural, and political issues that shape the production and reception of today’s cross-cultural films. It discusses three major problems, the Disney problem, the gender problem, and the cultural problem, that Mulan (2020) tackled with respectful efforts in Caro’s feminist filmmaking pattern. The film made significant compromises between its goals of cultural appropriateness, progressive feminism, and monetary success. Although it eventually failed to satisfactorily resolve these at times conflicting missions, it still achieved important progress in addressing some serious gender and cultural problems in Mulan’s contemporary intertextual metamorphosis, especially those introduced by the Disney animation. By revealing Mulan (2020)’s value and defects, this article intends to flesh out some real-world challenges that feminist movements must overcome to effectively transmit messages and bring about changes at the transcultural level in the arts.

Beyond Recidivism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shadd Maruna
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Past ◽  
Road Map ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Incarcerated Populations ◽  
Multidisciplinary Group ◽  
Criminology And Criminal Justice ◽  
Society Research

Although there are some indicators of a recent deceleration, and even, in some states, reversal, of the recent growth of the US incarcerated populations, the past few decades of “tough-on-crime” policies have resulted in the incarceration of millions of individuals. An inevitable consequence is that most imprisoned individuals are released, reentering society. Research about prisoner reentry has advanced significantly across fields in the last decade, with improved data collection, expanded questions, and policy relevance. This volume highlights some of this work, from a multidisciplinary group of scholars. While all of the chapters address questions related to incarceration and its consequences, they draw on and reflect deeply social and political issues that are likely to be of interest to a wide range of readers. Authors come from political science, sociology, criminology and criminal justice, and public policy. They also incorporate a range of methodological perspectives and methods, from ethnography to experimental designs, with several chapters drawing on mixed methods. In addition to the empirical analyses, the volume also provides a road map of where to go next in researching criminal justice policies and their consequences and in developing effective policies.

The Bible and Feminism

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Roe V Wade ◽  
Sexual Trafficking

This groundbreaking book breaks with established canons and resists some of the stereotypes of feminist biblical studies. A wide range of contributors—from the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, East Africa, South Africa, Argentina, Israel, Hong Kong, the US, the UK, and Iran—showcase new methodological and theoretical movements such as feminist materialisms; intersectionality; postidentitarian ?nomadic? politics; gender archaeology; lived religion; and theories of the human and the posthuman. They engage a range of social and political issues, including migration and xenophobia; divorce and family law; abortion; ?pinkwashing?; the neoliberal university; the second amendment; AIDS and sexual trafficking; Tianamen Square and 9/11; and the politics of ?the veil?. Foundational figures in feminist biblical studies work alongside new voices and contributors from a range of disciplines in conversations with the Bible that go well beyond the expected canon-within-the-canon assumed to be of interest to feminist biblical scholars. Moving beyond the limits of a text-orientated model of reading, they look at how biblical texts were actualized in the lives of religious revolutionaries, such as Joanna Southcott and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In important interventions—made all the more urgent in the context of the Trump presidency and Brexit—they make biblical traditions speak to gun legislation, immigration, the politics of abortion, and Roe v. Wade.

scholarly journals What are the chances you’re right about everything? An epistemic challenge for modern partisanship

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hrishikesh Joshi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
Party Line ◽  
The Subject

The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.

Measurement Invariance of a Universal Behavioral Screener Across Samples From the USA and Germany

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gino Casale ◽  
Robert J. Volpe ◽  
Brian Daniels ◽  
Thomas Hennemann ◽  
Amy M. Briesch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Measurement Invariance ◽  
Student Behavior ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
School Based ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Universal Screener ◽  
Confirmatory Factor ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa

Abstract. The current study examines the item and scalar equivalence of an abbreviated school-based universal screener that was cross-culturally translated and adapted from English into German. The instrument was designed to assess student behavior problems that impact classroom learning. Participants were 1,346 K-6 grade students from the US (n = 390, Mage = 9.23, 38.5% female) and Germany (n = 956, Mage = 8.04, 40.1% female). Measurement invariance was tested by multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across students from the US and Germany. Results support full scalar invariance between students from the US and Germany (df = 266, χ2 = 790.141, Δχ2 = 6.9, p < .001, CFI = 0.976, ΔCFI = 0.000, RMSEA = 0.052, ΔRMSEA = −0.003) indicating that the factor structure, the factor loadings, and the item thresholds are comparable across samples. This finding implies that a full cross-cultural comparison including latent factor means and structural coefficients between the US and the German version of the abbreviated screener is possible. Therefore, the tool can be used in German schools as well as for cross-cultural research purposes between the US and Germany.

Introduction: Emotion, History and the Arts

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Sullivan ◽  
Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Review Section ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Johan Huizinga

This introduction surveys the rise of the history of emotions as a field and the role of the arts in such developments. Reflecting on the foundational role of the arts in the early emotion-oriented histories of Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burkhardt, as well as the concerns about methodological impressionism that have sometimes arisen in response to such studies, the introduction considers how intensive engagements with the arts can open up new insights into past emotions while still being historically and theoretically rigorous. Drawing on a wide range of emotionally charged art works from different times and places—including the novels of Carson McCullers and Harriet Beecher-Stowe, the private poetry of neo-Confucian Chinese civil servants, the photojournalism of twentieth-century war correspondents, and music from Igor Stravinsky to the Beatles—the introduction proposes five ways in which art in all its forms contributes to emotional life and consequently to emotional histories: first, by incubating deep emotional experiences that contribute to formations of identity; second, by acting as a place for the expression of private or deviant emotions; third, by functioning as a barometer of wider cultural and attitudinal change; fourth, by serving as an engine of momentous historical change; and fifth, by working as a tool for emotional connection across communities, both within specific time periods but also across them. The introduction finishes by outlining how the special issue's five articles and review section address each of these categories, while also illustrating new methodological possibilities for the field.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

Ochrona dziedzictwa kulturowego a działania na dużych szybkozmiennych zbiorach danych – perspektywa kryminologiczna

2019 ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Szymon Buczyński
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
Big Data Analytics ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Cultural Organizations ◽  
Econometric Methods ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Huge Data ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Share Data ◽  
Processing Techniques

Recent technological revolutions in data and communication systemsenable us to generate and share data much faster than ever before. Sophisticated data tools aim to improve knowledge and boost confdence. That technological tools will only get better and user-friendlier over the years, big datacan be considered an important tool for the arts and culture sector. Statistical analysis, econometric methods or data mining techniques could pave theway towards better understanding of the mechanisms occurring on the artmarket. Moreover crime reduction and prevention challenges in today’sworld are becoming increasingly complex and are in need of a new techniquethat can handle the vast amount of information that is being generated. Thisarticle provides an examination of a wide range of new technological innovations (IT) that have applications in the areas of culture preservation andheritage protection. The author provides a description of recent technological innovations, summarize the available research on the extent of adoptionon selected examples, and then review the available research on the eachform of new technology. Furthermore the aim of this paper is to explore anddiscuss how big data analytics affect innovation and value creation in cultural organizations and shape consumer behavior in cultural heritage, arts andcultural industries. This paper discusses also the likely impact of big dataanalytics on criminological research and theory. Digital criminology supports huge data base in opposition to conventional data processing techniques which are not only in suffcient but also out dated. This paper aims atclosing a gap in the academic literature showing the contribution of a bigdata approach in cultural economics, policy and management both froma theoretical and practice-based perspective. This work is also a startingpoint for further research.

Modernism and American Ballet

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter explores the international and interdisciplinary backdrop of Lincoln Kirstein’s efforts to form an American ballet in the early 1930s. The political, economic, and cultural conditions of the Depression reinvigorated the search for an “American” culture. In this context, new openings for a modernist theory of ballet were created as intellectuals and artists from a wide range of disciplines endeavored to define the role of the arts in protecting against the dangerous effects of mass culture. Chapter 1 sheds new light on well-known critical debates in dance history between Kirstein and John Martin over whether ballet, with its European roots, could truly become “American” in contrast to modern dance. Was American dance going to be conceived in nationalist or transnationalist terms? That was the deeper conflict that underlay the ballet vs. modern dance debates of the early 1930s.

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