The Attractive Empire

The Attractive Empire PDF Author: Michael Baskett
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824831632
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
"Because imperialism has had such an appalling ideological reputation, we’ve lost sight of its excitement, the breathless anticipation of adventures in far-off lands. The Attractive Empire is a tour de force of enthralling historical scholarship that puts the appeal, and seductions, of imperialism on display, without underestimating its ugly consequences. Like its chosen subject, the book covers an astonishing array of texts, events, people, and issues. The clarity and vividness of the writing make it work effortlessly. Baskett’s organizational skills, narrative, and rhetoric deftly orchestrate a complex subject." —Darrell William Davis, University of New South Wales "Michael Baskett removes imperial Japanese film from its solitary confinement and commandingly analyzes how it functioned internationally. He commits a depth of research rarely found in English-language studies of Japanese cinema, and his mastery of the primary and secondary sources from beyond Japan’s borders distinctly set his book apart from previous scholarship on the subject. Not only is this a work that historians and film scholars will appreciate but also one that I look forward to assigning to undergraduates." —Barak Kushner, Cambridge University Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate Japan’s film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country’s film culture developed in lock step with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture’s sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. The Attractive Empire is the first comprehensive examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. In this stimulating new study, Michael Baskett traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semicolonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped primary sources from public and private archives across Asia, Europe, and the United States, Baskett provides close readings of individual films and trenchant analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. Finally, he highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the "hearts and minds" of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan’s attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia

Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia PDF Author: Barak Kushner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135012706X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
When Emperor Hirohito announced defeat in a radio broadcast on 15th August 1945, Japan was not merely a nation; it was a colossal empire stretching from the tip of Alaska to the fringes of Australia grown out of a colonial ideology that continued to pervade East Asian society for years after the end of the Second World War. In Overcoming Empire in Post-Imperial East Asia: Repatriation, Redress and Rebuilding, Barak Kushner and Sherzod Muminov bring together an international team of leading scholars to explore the post-imperial history of the region. From international aid to postwar cinema to chemical warfare, these essays all focus on the aftermath of Japan's aggressive warfare and the new international strategies which Japan, China, Taiwan, North and South Korea utilised following the end of the war and the collapse of Japan's empire. The result is a nuanced analysis of the transformation of postwar national identities, colonial politics, and the reordering of society in East Asia. With its innovative comparative and transnational perspective, this book is essential reading for scholars of modern East Asian history, the cold war, and the history of decolonisation.

Resisting Empire

Resisting Empire PDF Author: Jason A. Whitlark
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567008266
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
This book offers a fresh reading about the purpose for which Hebrews was written. In this book Whitlark argues that Hebrews engages both the negative pressures (persecution) and positive attractions (honor/prosperity) of its audience's Roman imperial context. Consequently, the audience of Hebrews appears to be in danger of defecting to the pagan imperial context. Due to the imperial nature of these pressures, Hebrews obliquely critiques the imperial script according to the rhetorical expectations in the first-century Mediterranean world-namely, through the use of figured speech. This critique is the primary focus of Whitlark's project. Whitlark examines Hebrews's figured response to the imperial hopes boasted by Rome along with Rome's claim to eternal rule, to the power of life and death, and to be led by the true, victorious ruler. Whitlark also makes a case for discerning Hebrews's response to the challenges of Flavian triumph. Whitlark concludes his study by suggesting that Hebrews functions much like Revelation, that is, to resist the draw of the Christians' Roman imperial context. This is done, in part, by providing a covert opposition to Roman imperial discourse. He also offers evaluation of relapse theories for Hebrews, of Hebrews's place among early Christian martyrdom, and of the nature of the resistance that Hebrews promotes.

Glorify the Empire

Glorify the Empire PDF Author: Annika A. Culver
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774824360
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
"In the 1930s and '40s, Japanese political architects of the Manchukuo project in occupied northeast China realized the importance of using various cultural media to promote a modernization program in the region, as well as its expansion into other parts of Asia. Ironically, the writers and artists chosen to spread this imperialist message had left-wing political roots in Japan, where their work strongly favoured modernist, even avant-garde, styles of expression. In Glorify the Empire, Annika Culver explores how these once anti-imperialist intellectuals produced modernist works celebrating the modernity of a fascist state and reflecting a complicated picture of complicity with, and ambivalence towards, Japan's utopian project. During the war, literary and artistic representations of Manchuria accelerated, and the Japanese-led culture in Manchukuo served as a template for occupied areas in Southeast Asia. A groundbreaking work, Glorify the Empire magnifies the intersection between politics and art in a rarely examined period in Japanese history."--Publisher's website.

Representing Empire

Representing Empire PDF Author: Ying Xiong
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004274111
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Book Description
By exploring the rich terrain of Japanese colonial literature in Taiwan and Manchuria, Representing Empire investigates the interplay between imperialism, nationalism, and Pan-Asianism during the era of Japan’s territorial expansion in Asia.

Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire

Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire PDF Author: Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000398455
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 138

Book Description
Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women’s active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening ethnocentric narratives that were at the heart of the Japanese empire. An appendix presents the first English translation of a memorable statement on comfort women by former Japanese propaganda actress, Ri Kōran / Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature and film studies, as well as gender, sexuality and postcolonial studies.

Constructing Empire

Constructing Empire PDF Author: Bill Sewell
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774836555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
Civilians play crucial roles in building empires. Constructing Empire shows how Japanese urban planners, architects, and other civilians contributed to constructing a modern colonial enclave in northeast China, their visions shifting over time. Japanese imperialism in Manchuria before 1932 resembled that of other imperialists elsewhere in China, but the Japanese thereafter sought to surpass their rivals by transforming the city of Changchun into a grand capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. This book sheds light on evolving attitudes toward empire and perceptions of national identity among Japanese in Manchuria in the first half of the twentieth century.

Empire of Texts in Motion

Empire of Texts in Motion PDF Author: Karen Laura Thornber
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170516
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Book Description
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies

An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies PDF Author: Jim Cheng
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540337
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Book Description
Compiled by two skilled librarians and a Taiwanese film and culture specialist, this volume is the first multilingual and most comprehensive bibliography of Taiwanese film scholarship, designed to satisfy the broad interests of the modern researcher. The second book in a remarkable three-volume research project, An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies catalogues the published and unpublished monographs, theses, manuscripts, and conference proceedings of Taiwanese film scholars from the 1950s to 2013. Paired with An Annotated Bibliography for Chinese Film Studies (2004), which accounts for texts dating back to the 1920s, this series brings together like no other reference the disparate voices of Chinese film scholarship, charting its unique intellectual arc. Organized intuitively, the volume begins with reference materials (bibliographies, cinematographies, directories, indexes, dictionaries, and handbooks) and then moves through film history (the colonial period, Taiwan dialect film, new Taiwan cinema, the 2/28 incident); film genres (animated, anticommunist, documentary, ethnographic, martial arts, teen); film reviews; film theory and technique; interdisciplinary studies (Taiwan and mainland China, Taiwan and Japan, film and aboriginal peoples, film and literature, film and nationality); biographical materials; film stories, screenplays, and scripts; film technology; and miscellaneous aspects of Taiwanese film scholarship (artifacts, acts of censorship, copyright law, distribution channels, film festivals, and industry practice). Works written in multiple languages include transliteration/romanized and original script entries, which follow universal AACR-2 and American cataloguing standards, and professional notations by the editors to aid in the use of sources.

Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain

Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain PDF Author: Stuart Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350113824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
While the British Empire is long gone, it survives as a recurring flashpoint in heated debates about the present and future of Britain and the nations over which Britain once ruled. Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain turns a critical eye to the widely-held notion that the long shadow of the imperial past has much to answer for, and asks to what extent should the residual after-effects of Britain's colonial empire be taken at face value? From the 'Rhodes must fall' controversy and contested anniversaries to immigration scares and the question of what Britishness is in a post-imperial world, an eclectic mix of expert researchers, writers and commentators consider the legacy of the British empire in the battle over Brexit. As the United Kingdom haggles its way out of the European Union and casts about for an alternative future, this volume shows how the memory of the empire is still as potent a political force as ever.