Class Schedule (Spring 2011)

Weekly readings will be marked by where they can be found: bookstore (see Course Book List); book reserve (see Course Reserve List for complete listing by week), article reserve, e-reserve, office for my office, or online for articles available for downloading from the web. E-reserve articles can be found on the library's Course Page for Anth 369 E-reserves. Just type in the password and find the article you need. Note that most of the articles and excerpts are available in books on reserve. Please let me know as soon as possible if you have any trouble obtaining the readings. Please print out all online and e-reserve readings to read them. Bring all readings to class. For readings questions and discussion forums see the Course Moodle Page.

For paper guidelines and a summary of assignment due dates, click HERE.

List of Weekly Discussants.

I) Perspectives on Media and Social Power

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3

II) Historical Precedents: The Emergence of Mass Culture in China

Week 4
Week 5

III) China's 2nd Revolution? Reform-era Transitions

Week 6
Week 7
Week 8

IV) Media Effects Media Uses: Interpretations and Subversions

Week 9
Week 10
Week 11
Week 12
Week 13

I) Perspectives on Media and Social Power

 

Week One - Goals and Perspectives

Chronology: The Trajectory of Reforms in China

Film: PBS Frontline, "The Persuaders", 2004. (Watch online).

Tues Feb 1 - First Day: Introductions and Goals

Thurs. Feb 3 Perspectives: shifting terrains and mobile identities

  • Ong, Aihwa. Intro., Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke, 1999. (24 pp). book, ereserve.

  • Dutton, Michael. "Streetlife Subalterns: An All-Consuming China," in Streetlife China. (13 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Liu Kang. "Popular Culture and the Culture of the Masses in Contemporary China," Dirlik and Zhang, (Eds.), Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. (19 pp.). book reserve and ereserve.

To deepen your understanding of issues and concepts raised this week, consult these sources:

  • Marcus, George and Michael Fischer. "The Repatriation of Anthropology as Cultural Critique," Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. (25 pp.)
  • Peters, John Durham. "Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture," in Gupta and Ferguson, eds, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
  • Gupta, Akhil and J. Ferguson. "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity and the Politics of Difference," in Gupta and Ferguson, eds, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
  • Spitulnik, Debra. "Anthropology and the Mass Media," in Annual Review of Anthropology 22, 1993: 293-315. (Available on-line thru J-STOR).
  • Donald, Stephanie and Michael Keane. "Media in China: New Convergences, New Approaches," in Donald et al, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2002.
  • Schnell, James. Perspectives on Communication in China
  • John Berger Ways of Seeing
  • Tang, Xiaobing. Chinese Modern : The Heroic and Quotidian (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Duke UP, April 2000.
  • Schell, Orville. Discos and Democracy

Check these links out for further information on this week's topics!

Use these links as quick references and contextualizing material. To really delve, you need to print and read all essays, or go look at books and articles in Further Reading.

Remember that materials on the web MUST be evaluated as critically as any other texts we consider in this course. For brief guidelines on thinking critically about the web, click HERE.

Available to watch online:

Growing Up Online In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. "The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it's something that really is the province of teenagers, " says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Youth Research project.

Digital Nation In Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, FRONTLINE presents an in-depth exploration of what it means to be human in a 21st-century digital world. Continuing a line of investigation she began with the 2008 FRONTLINE report Growing Up Online, award-winning producer Rachel Dretzin embarks on a journey to understand the implications of living in a world consumed by technology and the impact that this constant connectivity may have on future generations.

 

 

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Week Two - Perspectives on "Media" and "The Masses"

Tues. Feb 8- Commodities, Alienation and Deception?

  • Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. (25 pp.) Book reserve and ereserve.
  • Adorno and Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment and Mass Deception" in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. (47 pp.). Book reserve.

Thurs. Feb 10- Contested Meanings: The Cultural Politics of Representation and Mass Communication

  • Ginsburg, Faye, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin. "Introduction," in Ginsburg et al, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: Univ. of CA press, 2002. (25 pp). book reserve. ereserve.
  • Spitulnik, Debra. "Media," in Duranti, (Ed.), Key Terms in Language and Culture. Blackwell, 2001. (3 pp.). ereserve.
  • Hall, Stuart. "Encoding/Decoding," in Media Studies: a Reader (10 pp.) On book reserve, ereserve.
  • Williams, Raymond. "Hegemony," "Traditions, Institutions, Formations," "Dominant, Residual, Emergent" in Marxism and Literature, 1977. book reserve. (19 pp)

Commentary 1 Due Friday, Feb. 11, 5 pm, my office, 312 Vollum

  • Askew, Kelly. "Introduction," The Anthropology of Media: a Reader. 2002.
  • Axel, Brian Keith. Anthropology and the New Technologies of Communication. Cultural Anthropology Aug. 2006, Vol. 21, No. 3: 354-384.
  • Baudrillard, Jean. "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media," in Media Studies: a Reader (10 pp.). On book reserve.
  • Bošković, Aleksandar. Thinking Digital: Anthropology and the new media.
  • Cultural anthropology journal media studies list and overview
  • Douglas Davis. The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (An Evolving Thesis: 1991-1995). Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon. (1995), pp. 381-386.
  • Fiske, John. "Commodities and Culture: formations of the People," in Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. (24 pp.).
  • Gans, Herbert. Ch. 1 "The Critique of Mass Culture," in Popular culture and high culture: an analysis and evaluation of taste. New York, Basic Books 1974.
  • Garnham, Nicholas. "The Media and the Public Sphere," in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT press, 1992.
  • Habermas, Jurgen. "The Public Sphere," in Media Studies: a Reader (5 pp.) On book reserve.
  • Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture. New York: International General, 1987.
  • Kuhn, Annette. "The Power of the Image," in Media Studies: a Reader (5 pp). On book reserve.
  • Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media.
  • Marris and Thornham. "The Media and Social Power: Introduction," in Media Studies: a Reader
  • Marx, Karl. Ch. 1 Commodities, Capital, Vol. 1, reprinted in Robert Tucker, (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, W. W. Norton and Co., 1978[1867]. (25 pp.) In library
  • McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message," in The Anthropology of Media: a Reader. 2002[1964].
  • Rothenbuhler, Eric W., Mihai Coman, eds. Media anthropology. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage, c2005.
  • Warner, Michael. "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT press, 1992.

Media Conglomeration

Frankfurt School

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969)

Representation & the media, 2002
Stuart Hall, a renowned public speaker and teacher, lectures on the central ideas of cultural studies-- that reality is not experienced directly, but through the lens of culture, through the way that human beings represent and tell stories about the world in which they live. Using visual examples, Hall shows how the media-- and especially the visual media-- have become the key players in the process of modern story telling.

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Week Three - Difference and Power in Globalization

Chronology: Nation-State Building in China

Tues. Feb. 15- Contesting National Communities

  • Anderson, Benedict. "Introduction," and "Ch. 3: The Origins of National Consciousness," in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2003 [1983]. (12 pp). A few copies in bookstore, book reserve,ereserve.
  • Foster, Robert J. "Making National Cultures in the Global Ecumene", Annual Review of Anthropology 20, 1991. (20pp). On-line thru J-STOR.
  • Fitzgerald, John. "The Nationless State: the Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism," in Jonathan Unger, (Ed.), Chinese Nationalism. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996. (27 pp). On book, ereserve.

Thurs. Feb. 17- "Globalizing" Forces and their Discontents

  • Curran, James and Myung-Jin Park. "Beyond Globalization Theory," in Curran and Park, (Eds.), De-Westernizing Media Studies. London: Routledge, 2000. (12 pp.). On book, ereserve.
  • Mazzarella, William. "Culture, Globalization, Mediation," in Annual Review of Anthropology, 2004.33:345–67. Available Online thru Annual Reviews.

Commentary 2 Due Friday, Feb. 18, 5 pm, my office, 312 Vollum

  • Anagnost, Ann. National Pasttimes. 1997.
  • Brook, Timothy. "Capitalism and the Writing of Modern History in China," in Brook and Blue, (Eds.), China and Historical Capitalism: Geneologies of Sinological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999.
  • Ching, Leo. "Globalizing the Regional; Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital" in Public Culture 12(1), Winter 2000. (24 pp.).
  • Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff, John L. "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," in Public Culture 12(2), Spring 2000. On-line thru J-STOR
  • Cooper, Frederick. 2001. "What is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 101: 189-213. Available Online.
  • Coronil, Fernando. 2000. Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature. Public Culture12(2): 351–374. Available online.
  • Cvetkovich, Ann and Douglas Kellner. "Introduction", in Articulating the Global and the Local. Westview Press, 1997. See me.
  • Duara, Prasenjit. "De-Constructing the Chinese Nation," in Jonathan Unger, (Ed.), Chinese Nationalism. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996. On book reserve.
  • Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation. 1995.
  • Graeber, David. 2002. "The Anthropology of Globalization," American Anthropologist 104 (4). Available Online
  • Hoogvelt, Ankie. 1997. Ch. 6 Globalisation. Globalization and the PostColonial World. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
  • Kearney, Michael. "the Local and the Global: the Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism," Annual Review of Anthropology 24:547-565, 1995. Online JSTOR.
  • Lee, Gregory Troubadours, Trumpeters, troubled Makers
  • Mintz, Sidney. 1998. The Localization of Anthropological Practice. Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117-133. Available Online.
  • Oakes, Tim. "China's Provincial Identities: Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing 'Chineseness'," in The Journal of Asian Studies 59(3), August 2000: 667-92. Online JSTOR
  • Ong, Aihwa. espec. ch. 2 "A Momentary Glow of Fraternity," in Flexible Citizenship
  • Storper, Michael. "Lived Effects of the Contemporary Economy: Globalization, Inequality, and Consumer Society," in Public Culture 12(2), Spring 2000. On-line thru J-STOR.
  • Townsend, James. "Chinese Nationalism," in in Jonathan Unger, (Ed.), Chinese Nationalism. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996. On book reserve.
  • Tsing, Anna. 2000. "The Global Situation," Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 327-360. Available On-line.
  • Turner, Terence. 2003. "Class Projects, Social Consciousness, and the Contradictions of 'Globalization," In Friedman, ed., Globalization, the State and Violence.

TBA

 

 

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II) Historical Precedents: The Emergence of Mass Culture in China

 

Week Four - Late Imperial and Republican Era

Chronology: Late Imperial and Early Modern Transitions in China

Tues. Feb. 22- Foundations: Ming-Qing transitions

  • Rawski, Evelyn. "Economic and Social Foundations of Late Imperial Culture," in Johnson, Nathan and Rawski, (Eds.), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1985. (30 pp.). On book, ereserve.
  • Johnson, David. "Communication, Class and Consciousness in Late Imperial China," in Johnson, Nathan and Rawski, (Eds.), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1985. (38 pp.). On book, ereserve.

Thurs. Feb. 24- Popular and New Mass Genres: Republican Era

  • Leo Ou-Fan Lee and Andrew Nathan. "the Beginnings of Mass Culture: Journalism and Fiction in the Late Ch'ing and Beyond," in Johnson, Nathan and Rawski, (Eds.), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1985. (35 pp.). On book, ereserve and article reserve.
  • Arkush, David. "Love and Marriage in North Chinese Peasant Operas" in Link, Madsen and Pickowicz, (Eds.), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1989. (10 pp.). On book, ereserve and article reserve.
  • Leyda, Jay. Dianying, pp. 1-30, 60-77. In pamphlet and on pamphlet and book reserve.
  • Lust, John. Chinese popular prints. Leiden ; New York : E.J. Brill, 1996. (In lib.)
  • Po Sung-nien and David Johnson. Domesticated deities and auspicious emblems : the iconography of everyday life in village China ; popular prints and papercuts from the collection of Po Sung-nien. Berkeley : Chinese Popular Culture Project, University of California, 1992. (In lib.)
  • Leo Ou-fan Lee. Shanghai modern : the flowering of a new urban culture in China, 1930-1945. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999. (In lib.)
  • Jones, Andrew. Yellow music : media culture and colonial modernity in the Chinese jazz age. Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2001. (in lib.)

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Week Five - The proganda state? Popular media and the "mass line" during the Maoist years

Chronology: The Maoist Years in China

Sunday Feb. 27- Film assignment: "Yellow Earth", 90 min (Bio 19, 5 pm)

Tues. March 1- Producing the "broad masses": Maoist thought work

  • Mao Zedong. 1942. Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art. Online at marxist.org
  • Wen Ho Chang. Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989. pp. 30-45. On book, ereserve.
  • Chu, Godwin and Philip Cheng. "Revolutionary Opera: An Instrument for Cultural Change," in Chu, (Ed.), Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: Univ. of HI press, 1978. (26 pp). ereserve.
  • Poon, David Jim-tat. "Tatzepao: Its History and Significance as a Communication Medium," in Chu, (Ed.), Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: Univ. of HI press, 1978. (22 pp.). ereserve.

Film clip: Mao's Little red video

Thurs. March 3 Interpretations and subversions?

  • Xiaomei Chen. "Growing up with Posters in the Maoist Era," in Evans and Donald, (Eds.), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 1999. (18 pp.). On book, ereserve.

  • Padma 'bum. Six stars with a crooked neck : Tibetan memoirs of the Cultural Revolution / Padma-ʼbum ; translated by Lauran R. Hartley. Dharamsala, Distt. Kangra, H.P. : Bod kyi dus bab, 2001, pp 85-148. book, ereserve

Midterm Paper Handout

  • Chang-Tai Hung. "Two Images of Socialism: Woodcuts in Chinese Communist Politics," in Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(1), Jan. 1997: 34-60. Online JSTOR.
  • Cheek, Timothy. The Fading of Wild Lilies: Wang Shiwei and Mao Zedong's Yan'an Talks in the First CPC Rectification Movement. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs No. 11 (Jan., 1984), pp. 25-58.
  • Gittings, John. "Excess and Enthusiasm," in Evans and Donald, (Eds.), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 1999. (17 pp.). On book reserve.
  • Harding, Harry. "The Legacy of Mao Zedong," in China's Second Revolution: Reform After Mao. Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1987. (28 pp.). On book and article reserve.
  • Hwng, John. "Lien Huan Hua: Revolutionary Serial Pictures," in Chu, (Ed.), Popular Media in China: Shaping New Cultural Patterns. Honolulu: Univ. of HI press, 1978. See me.
  • Landsberger, Stefan Chinese propaganda posters : from revolution to modernization Armonk, N.Y. : M.E. Sharpe, 1995.(see me).
  • Leyda, Jay. "A Chinese People's Cinema? 1960-67," in Dianying. On book reserve.
  • Lynch, Daniel. "ch. 2: Thought-Work Institutions Under Reform," in After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and 'Thought Work' in Reformed China. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999. (pp. 18-26). On book reserve.
  • Min, Anchee. Chinese Propaganda Posters. London: Taschen, 2003.
  • Peter J. Seybolt, Terror and Conformity: Counterespionage Campaigns, Rectification, and Mass Movements, 1942-1943. Modern China, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 39-73.
  • Yu, Frederick. Mass Persuasion in Communist China. London: Praeger, 1964. (see me).

Online Video:

Red Detachment of Women Ballet (Film), (premiered as ballet 1964)

Scene from Red Detachment Ballet film (main character arrives at liberated area)

Red Detachment of Women (Feature Film, Shanghai, 1961, with subtitles)

 

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III) China's 2nd Revolution? Reform-era Transitions

 

Week Six - Shifting Identities: The Shape of Everyday Life

Chronology: The Trajectory of Reforms in China

Sunday, March 6- Film Assignment: Ermo (1994), 93 min (5 pm, Bio 19)

Tues. March 8- Competing Attempts to Produce and Control "the Masses": "Modernization", Economic Shifts and the State

  • Lull, James. "Modernizing China: The Predicament of Reform," in China Turned On: Television, Reform and Resistance. London: Routledge, 1991. (15 pp.) On book, ereserve.
  • Dutton, Michael. Streetlife China. pp. 42-69, pp. 81-98, pp. 115-129, pp. 214-231 (75 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.

Thurs. March 10- Re-shaping everyday life through consumption and new communications infrastructure

  • De Certeau, Michel. 1984. Ch. II "Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language," and Ch. III "Making Do: Uses and Tactics," in Part I: A Very Ordinary Culture. The Practice of Everyday Life. Univ. of Calif. Press. (pp. 15-43) On book, ereserve.
  • Davis, Deborah. "Introduction: a Revolution in Consumption," in Davis, (Ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China. Berkeley: Univ. of Ca Press, 2000. (21 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.

  • Erwin, Kathleen.  "Heart-to-Heart, Phone-to-Phone: Family Values, Sexuality, and the Politics of Shanghai's Advice Hotlines," in Davis, (Ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China.  Berkeley: Univ. of Ca Press, 2000.  (25 pp.)  In bookstore and on book reserve.

  • Anagnost, Ann. "A Surfeit of Bodies: Population and the Rationality of the State in Post-Mao China," in Ginsburg and Rapp, eds., Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. 1995,"
  • Appadurai, Arjun. "Consumption, Duration and History," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996. bookstore and book reserve.
  • Arjun Appadurai (Editor) The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective
  • Bourdieu, Pierre.  "Introduction," in Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984.  (6 pp).
  • Carrier, James and Josiah Heyman. "Consumption and Political Economy," in Journal of the Royal Anthrological Institute 3(2) June 1997: 355-373.
  • Chan, Anita. "The culture of Survival: Lives of Migrant Workers through the Prism of Private Letters," in Link et al, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society.Rowan and Littlefield: 2002.
  • De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life.
  • Douglas, Mary the world of goods : towards an anthropology of Consumption.
  • Dutton, Michael. Policing Chinese Politics: A History. Duke Univ Press, 2005.
  • Sapio, Flora. Sovereign Power and the Law in China. Brill, 2010.
  • Siu, Helen. "Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China," in Davis and Harrell, (Eds.), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era. Berkeley: Univ. of CA Press, 1993. (23 pp.).
  • Stone et al. "Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives," in Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives. Haugerud et al, eds., Rowan and Littlefield, 2000.
  • Watson, Rubie, ed. Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism.School of American Research, 1994. (see me).
  • Wen Ho Chang. Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989. pp 45-58.

Cell Phones in China (largest network in the world):

 

 

Films in Reed Library

  • The Story of Qiu Ju (1992, Zhang Yimou) he film tells the story of a peasant woman, Qiu Ju, who lives in a rural area of China. When her husband is kicked in the groin by the village head, Qiu Ju, despite her pregnancy, travels to a nearby town, and later a big city to deal with its bureaucrats and find justice.
  • Petition (2009, Zhao Liang). In 1996, when Jia Zhangke picked up a 16mm camera to film his fellow townsmen in Linfen, Zhao Liang, who used to live across the corridor to Jia at Beijing Film Academy, held the camera to record a special group of people – petitioners near Beijing South Railway Station. (on order for Reed lib).

 

 

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Week Seven - Mass Media and the Reform-Era State

Chronology: The Trajectory of Reforms in China

Sunday, March 13- Film Assignment: The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 77 min (5 pm, Bio 19)

Tues. March 15 The expansion of state-sponsored media

  • Brady, Anne-Marie. Chs. 1-3, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Lanham, MD: 2008. (60 pp.)

  • Zhao, Yuezhi. "Ch. 1 Party Journalism in China: Theory and Practice," in Media, Market and Democracy in China. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. (19 pp.). on book reserve, ereserve.

Thurs. March 17 Proliferating Genres and Voices: Dangers to the state

  • Pickowicz, Paul. "Popular Cinema and Political Thought in Post-Mao China," in Link, Madsen and Pickowicz, (Eds.), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1989. (15 pp.). On book, ereserve, and article reserve.
  • Yang, Mayfair.  "Film Discussion Groups in China:  State Discourse or Plebian Public Sphere?" in Visual Anthropology Review 10/1, 1994, pp 112-125. ereserve.

  • Latham, Kevin. "Nothing but the Truth: News Media, Power and Hegemony in South China," The China Quarterly, No. 163 (Sep., 2000), pp. 633-654. (Online).

Midterm Paper due, Friday, March 18, 5 pm, Vollum 312

The State, "free speech", and the News

  • Blum, Susan. Lies that Bind: Chinese Truths, Other Truths. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. [see Ch. 4 on Censorship vs. Brady ch. 5 Regimenting the public mind].
  • Calhoun, Craig. "Tiananmen, Television and the Public sphere: Internationalization of Culture and the Beijing Spring of 1989," Public culture 2(1), Fall 1989: 54-71.
  • Davies, Gloria, ed. Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. [conclusion by Barme, good article on 80s pop culture fever]
  • Wen Ho Chang. "Television in China," "China Public Broadcasting System," and "Radio Beijing," in Mass Media in China: The History and the Future. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989. On book reserve.
  • Hsiao, Russell. Towing the Party Line on Free Speech. China Brief Volume: 9 Issue: 5, 2009.
  • Chin-Chuan Lee. "The global and the national of the Chinese Media," in Lee, ed. Chinese Media, Global Contexts. New York: Routledge, 2003. On book, ereserve. (25 pp)
  • Lull, James.  "ch. 9: Tiananmen Square and Beyond: China's Insurmountable Image Problem," in China Turned On: Television, Reform and Resistance.  London: Routledge, 1991.  (25 pp.). On book, ereserve.
  • Lynch, Daniel. "ch. 2: Thought-Work Institutions Under Reform," (pp. 26-52), and "Ch.4: The Globalization of Thought-Work", "ch. 5: The Pluralization of Thought-Work," in After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and 'Thought Work' in Reformed China. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999. (36 pp.). On book reserve.
  • Newsweek. "All the Propaganda That’s Fit to Print: Why Xinhua, China’s state news agency, could be the future of journalism," 2010.
  • Sinclair, John, Elizabeth Jacka, and Stuart Cunningham. "New Patterns In Global Television," in Media Studies: a Reader. On book reserve.
  • Yurchak, Alexei. Everything was Forever Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton Univ. Press, 2006.
  • Zhang, Xiaoling. 'From Totalitarianism to Hegemony: the reconfiguration of the party-state and the transformation of Chinese communication', Journal of Contemporary China, 20: 68, 103 — 115, 2011.
  • Zhao, Junhao. "Ch. 4: Television Program Importation Since the Reform of the 1980's," in The Internationalization of Television in China. Westport: Praeger, 1998. (18 pp.). On book reserve.
  • Zhao, Yuezhi.  "Ch. 2 The Trajectory of Media Reform," in Media, Market and Democracy in China.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. (17 pp.). on book reserve.

New Documentary Film Movement

  • Lu Xinyu. Documenting China: The New Documentary Movement  (Beijing, SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003)
  • Lu Xinyu. "The Power and Pain of Chinese New Documentary Moverment" (Dushu No. 5, 2006).
  • Lu Xinyu. Floating as the keyword: Chinese Independent Documentary Films in
    Post-Socialist China.
  • "A Record of the New Documentary Movement in China" [mentions Lu Xinyu's work]
  • dgeneratefilms [distributor of Chinese indep films; interview with Lu Xinyu].

Chinese State Media Organizations

Chinese Propaganda Posters

Films in Reed Library

  • The carriers of electric shadows / Les Films Grain de Sable ; un film de Hervé et Renaud Cohen, New York, NY : First Run/Icarus Films, c1993. "In the heart of the Chinese province of Sichuan, a team of itinerant projectionists-- a woman and two men-- travel through the countryside showing films to peasants. This documentary accompanies these missionaries of popular cinema from village to village as it explores their devotion to a profession threatened by the arrival of television and Chinese economic reforms".
  • No sex, no violence, no news: the battle to control China's airwaves / Film Australia ; produced and directed by Stefan Moore and Susan Lambert. New York : Filmakers Library, c1995. Examines the battle to control China's television airwaves. Working with a government that allows nothing of social or political import to be broadcast, entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia bring their full complement of consumerism and mindless entertainment to the millions of Chinese greedy for a glimpse of the outside world,

[Films in Reed Library discussed in Week 7 Readings]

  • Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1980) / Shang Hai Dian Ying Zhi Pian Chang
    Palo Alto, CA : China Video Movies. Two young lovers are forced to separate under the political pressure of the Anti-Rightest Campaign. Twenty years later, after both have married other people, they are reunited to confront the results of their past. [In Chinese only!].
  • At middle age. Palo Alto, Calif. : China Video Movies Distributing Co., 1983. Directors, Wang Qiman and Sun Yu; screen play, Chen Rong.
  • Red sorghum (1987) / Xian Film Studio, The People's Republic of China ; produced by Tian-ming Wu ; directed by Zhang Yimou. In the1930s China a young woman is sent by her father to marry the leprous owner of a winery. In the nearby red sorghum fields she falls for one of his servants. When the master dies she finds herself inheriting the isolated business.
  • Hibiscus town (1989) / Shanghai dian ying zhi pian chang ; screenplay, Ah Cheng, Xie Jin ; director, Xie Jin. Story of a couple who sells rice beancurd for a living. During the "four clean-ups" movement of 1964, they are classified as new rich peasants: their house is confiscated and the husband is driven to suicide. After the Cultural Revolution, the wife falls in love with a rightist and almost dies when having a difficult delivery of their baby.
  • Old well (1987)/ [produced by Xian Film Studio]. Palo Alto, Calif. : China Film Export & Import ; Hong Kong : distributed by Solid Video Ltd. The story of the centuries old search for water in a Chinese mountain village and the love between a married man and another woman trapped together in a well.

 

 

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Spring Break: March 21-25

 

Week Eight - Advertising, Culture and Commercialization

Sunday, March 27 Film Assignment: Big Shot's Funeral (5 pm, Bio 19), 100 min

Tues, March 29 The state and the lure of commercialization

  • Williams, Raymond. "Advertising: the Magic System," in Media Studies: A Reader. (5 pp.). On book reserve, ereserve.
  • Barme, Geremie. "Ch. 9: CCP & Adcult PRC," in In the Red. (20 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Jing Wang. "Ch. 1 Local Content," Brand New China: Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture. Harvard University Press 2008. (30 pp). bookstore and book reserve.

Thurs. March 31: Producing consumer identities and spaces

  • Dutton, Michael. "Market Trainings", in Streetlife China. (12 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Notar, Beth. "Of Labor and Liberation: Images of Women in Current Chinese Television Advertising," Visual Anthropology Review 10(2) Fall: 29-44, 1994. ereserve.
  • Jing Wang. "Ch. 2 Positioning the New Modern Girl," Brand New China: Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture. Harvard University Press 2008. (30 pp). bookstore, book reserve.
  • Barme, Geremie. "Ch. 1: The Chinese Velvet Prison," In the Red.
  • Dai Jinhua. "Invisible Writing: The Politics of Chinese Mass Culture in the 1990's," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11(1), 1999. (26 pp.).
  • Davis, Deborah. "When a House Becomes his Home," in Link et al, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society.Rowan and Littlefield: 2002. [good companion to Fraser, about Shanghai too].
  • Fowles, Jib. "The Dynamics Behind the Advertisement," Advertising and Popular Culture. London: Sage, 1996.
  • Fraser, David.  "Inventing Oasis:  Luxury Housing Advertisements and Reconfiguring Domestic Space in Shanghai, " in Davis, (Ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China.  Berkeley: Univ. of Ca Press, 2000.  (28 pp.).  In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Jing Wang. ch. 5 bobos, Ch. 6 Youth culture and music marketing, mobile phones
  • Lewis, Stephen Wayne. "What Can I do for Shanghai? Selling Spiritual Civilization in China's Cities," in Donald et al, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2002.
  • Lynch, Daniel. "ch. 3: Commercialization of Thought-Work," in After the Propaganda State: Media, Politics, and 'Thought Work' in Reformed China. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999. (50 pp). On book reserve.
  • Wanhsiu Sunny Tsai. "Family man in advertising? A content analysis of male domesticity and fatherhood in Taiwanese commercials", Asian Journal of Communication, Volume 20, Issue 4 December 2010 , pages 423 - 439.
  • Zhao, Yuezhi. "Ch. 3: Media Commercialization with Chinese Characteristics," and "Ch. 4: Corruption: the Journalism of Decadence," in Media, Market and Democracy in China. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. In bookstore and on book reserve.

Advertising and Pop Art in China

Theory

  • John Harms and Douglas Kellner. Toward A Critical Theory of Advertising. Illuminations, Critical Theory Website
    This article on advertising provides an excellent overview of the theoretical roots of critical media studies in the U.S. and Europe.Full text on-line.
    http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell6.htm
  • Sut Jhally vs. James Twitchell on the Impact of Advertising
    These two men are among the most prominent opposing voices in current debates about the social impacts of advertising. This online debate was facilitated by Stay Free Magazine.
    http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/16/twitchell.html
  • Sut Jhally. Advertising at the Edge of the Apocalypse
    Sut Jhally is professor of Communications at the University of Massachusettes-Amherst where he founded the Media Education Foundation. He is one of the most outspoken, marxist-informed critics of the social impacts of advertising. This article is on his personal website full-text.
    http://www.sutjhally.com/onlinepubs/onlinepubs_frame.html

Online Video:

Nike "Chamber of Fear" commercial (featuring Lebron James, hugely unsuccessful in China)

Libo Beer Shanghai commercial

Coca-Cola "Windmill" commercial (1990s) (Youku link also has collection of other Coca-Cola commercials in China)

"Back Dorm Boys" original viral video

"Back Dorm Boys" perform in Motorola ad (by Beijing branch of 4A firm Ogilvy & Mather)

"Back Dorm Boys" Pepsi ad

Wendy's commercial parodying Soviet ads (1980s)

 

 

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IV) Media Effects Media Uses: Interpretations and Subversions

 

Week Nine: Television and the Reshaping of Everyday Life

Sunday Apr 3 Film Assignment: No Sex, No Violence, No News, 1995 (5 pm, Bio 19), 55 min

Tues. Apr 5  TV and Everyday Life

  • Ma, Eric Kit-wai.  "Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China," in Curran and Park, (Eds.), De-Westernizing Media Studies.  London: Routledge, 2000. (10 pp.).  On ereserve and book reserve.
  • Curtin, Michael. "Introduction," and "Ch. 9 Reterritorializing Star TV in the PRC," in Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. (~40 pp). (bookstore, book reserve).
  • Hai Ren. "Life Spectacles: Media, Business Synergy, and Affective Work in Neoliberal China," Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, July 2009. Post-Mao, Post-Bourdieu: Class and Taste in Contemporary China, Special Issue, guest edited by Yi Zheng and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald. (Online).

Thurs. Apr 7 Consuming Shows: Television Spectatorship

  • Fung, Anthony and Eric Ma. "Satellite Modernity: four modes of Televisual imagination in the disjunctive socio-mediascape of Guangzhou," in Donald et al, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2002.
  • Davey, Gareth. "Children's Television, Radio, Internet, and Computer Usage in a City and a Village of China," Visual Anthropology 21: 160-165, 2008.
  • Hong, Junhao the Internationalization of Television in China.
  • Jing Wang. Ch.7 CCTV and ad media, Brand New China.
  • Keane, Michael. "A Revolution in Television and a Great Leap Forward for Innovation? China in the Global Television Format Business," inMoran and Keane, eds., Television Across Asia. Routledge, 2004.
  • Liu, H.  "Beijing Sojourners in New York:  Postsocialism and the Question of Ideology in Global Media Culture," in Positions 7(3): 763-797, 1999.  (28 pp.)
  • Lull, James. "Ch. 2: In the Name of Civilization," "Ch. 4: Television in Urban China," "Ch. 6: China's New Star," in China Turned On: Television, Reform and Resistance. London: Routledge, 1991.
  • Yin Hong. "Meaning, Production, Consumption: The history and reality of Television Drama in China," in Donald et al, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2002. (see me)

Online Video

 

 

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Week Ten -New Virtual Worlds: The Cultural Politics of the Internet

Tues Apr 12 State and "Civil Society"

Thurs. Apr 14 Censorship and Subversions

  • Zhou Yongming. 2006. Ch. 8, Conclusion. Historicizing online politics: telegraphy, the Internet, and political participation in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. (bookstore and book reserve).

  • Chase, Michael, James Mulvenon and Nina Hachigian. "Comrade to Comrade Networks: the Social and Political Implications of peer-to-peer networks in China," in Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, eds., Chinese Cyberspaces: Technological Changes and Political Effects. London: Routledge, 2006. (book, ereserve).

  • Lindter, Silvia. "Google.cn & Beyond: Politics of Digital Media," on The China Beat blog, March 25, 2010.

Final Paper Handout

  • Bob, Clifford. Merchants of Morality' in Foreign Policy, Jan-Feb 2002.
  • Bošković, Aleksandar. Thinking Digital: Anthropology and the new media.
  • Blum, Susan. Lies that Bind: Chinese Truths, Other Truths. Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. [-Blum, Ch. 4 on Censorship vs. Brady ch. 5 Regimenting the public mind]
  • Caldwell, John., ed. 2000. Electronic Media and Technoculture. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press.
  • China's digital dream: the impact of the Internet on Chinese society.  European University Press (December 24, 2003)
  • Jens Damm and Simona Thomas, eds., Chinese Cyberspaces: Technological Changes and Political Effects. London: Routledge, 2006.
  • The Economist, April 27th, 2006. China and the Internet: The Party, the People, and the Power of Cybertalk. (downloaded pdf in China Media pdfs folder).
  • Gudrun, Wacker. "The Internet and Censorship in China," in Hughes, Christopher and Gudrun Wacker, eds. China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward. Routledge, 2003.
  • Hart, Keith. "Notes Toward an Anthropology of the Internet," Horizontes Antropologicos 10(21): Jan/June 2004.
  • Hartford, Kathleen. Cyberspace with Chinese Characteristics, Current History 99(638): 255-262, 2000. (I have, in file)
  • Hughes, Christopher and Gudrun Wacker, eds. China and the Internet: Politics of the Digital Leap Forward. Routledge, 2003.
  • Ho, K.C, Kluver and Yang, eds. 2003. Asia.com: Asia Encounters the Internet. London: Routledge. (see me).
  • Tim Jordan Cyberpower : The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet
  • Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce, Khun Eng Kuah. Chinese Women and the Cyberspace, 2008.
  • Mackinnon, Rebecca. CHINA - "Race to the Bottom" Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship, Human Rights Watch report. August 2006.
  • McLagan, Meg. "Computing for Tibet: Virtual Politics  in the Post-Cold War Era," in Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago UPress, 1996.
  • Mengin, Francoise, ed. Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information. Palgrave, 2004.
  • Munson, Todd. 1999. "Selling China: www.cnta.com and Cultural Nationalism," The Journal for Multimedia History 2.
  • Ong, Aihwa. "Urban Assemblages: an Ecological Sense of the Knowledge Economy," in Mengin, Francoise, ed. Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information. Palgrave, 2004.
  • Sassen, Saskia. ch. 9 Electronic Space and Power. in Globalization and its Discontents
  • Special issue of J. of Current Chinese Affairs on the internet, 36(4), 2007
                -Farrer. China's women sex bloggers (I have pdf)
                -Ho Gay space
                -Administration, censorship, control: the state of the art
  • Tashi Rabgey. New Tibet: Citizenship and the Public in Sino-Tibetan Cyberspace. Unpub. Manuscript. (see me).
  • Yang, Guobin. The Internet and Civil Society in China: a Preliminary Assessment. Journal of Contemporary China. 12(36), 2003. (I have).
  • Yang, Guobin (2003), “The co-evolution of the internet and civil society in China”, in: Asian Survey, 43:3, pp.405-422.
  • You've got dissent!: [rand corp]; Chinese dissident use of the Internet and Beijing's counter-strategies, Issue 1543.
  • Jinqiu Zhao. The Internet and rural development in China: the socio-structural paradigm
  • Yongnian Zheng. Technological empowerment:the Internet, state, and society in China. Stanford University Press, 2008.
  • Zixue Tai. The Internet in China: cyberspace and civil society.

TBA

 

 

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Week Eleven - Video Gaming, Subcultures and the Construction of Youth

Sun., Apr 17 - Film Assignment: Gold Farmers, (Bio 19, 5 pm), 39 min.

Tues. Apr 19 Online Communities and Youth

  • Wilson, Samuel and Leighton Peterson. "The Anthropology of Online Communities," Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 449-467, 2002. (avail online).

  • Golub and Lingley. “Just Like the Qing Empire”: Internet Addiction, MMOGs, and Moral Crisis in Contemporary China, Games and Culture 3: 59-75, January 2008. (ereserv).

  • Giese, Karsten. "Speaker's Corner or Virtual Panopticon: Discursive Construction of Chinese Identities Online," Mengin, Francoise, ed. Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information. Palgrave, 2004. (book, ereserve).

Thurs. Apr 21 Online Games and Gold Farming

Youth, subculture and the Internet

  • Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "The Electronic Vernacular," in Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago UPress, 1996. (book, ereserve).
  • Section on early internet communities, "The Net Defiant," in Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago UPress, 1996.
  • New York Times."The life of the Chinese Gold farmer"
  • Rem, Rinna Chinese gold farmers must die : killing for the fantasy of play, identity, and the commodity in World of Warcraft. 2009 (Reed SeniorThesis).

Youth, subculture and Music

  • Baranovitch, Nimrod. China's New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender and Politics 1978-1997. Berkeley: Univ. of CA press, 2003.
  • de Kloet, Jeroen. "Let Him Fucking See the Green Smoke Beneath my Groin: The Mythology of Chinese Rock," in Dirlik and Zhang, (Eds.), Postmodernism and China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. on book reserve.
  • -------------------. "Rock in a Hard Place: Commercial Fantasies in China's Music Industry," in Donald et al, eds., Media in China: Consumption, Content and Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2002.

  • Evans, Harriet.  "Advice to Adolescents," in Women and Sexuality in China.  New York: Continuum, 1997. (25 pp.).

  • Farrer, James. 2004. "Ch. 4: True Stories: From Romance to Irony," in Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago U. Press. Book reserve and ereserve.

  • Fiske, John. "Productive Pleasures," ," in Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1989. (18 pp.). On article and book reserve.
  • Frith, Simon. "Formalism, Realism and Leisure: the Case of Punk," in Gelder and Thornton, eds., The Subcultures Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997[1980]. (9 pp).
  • Grossberg, Lawrence. "Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life," in Gelder and Thornton, eds., The Subcultures Reader. On book reserve, article and ereserve.
  • Huot, Claire. "Rock Music from Mao to Nirvana," in China' New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000.
  • Jing Wang: ch. 6 ads and music. Brand New China.

  • Jones, Andrew.  Like a Knife.  Ch's 1, 4, 5. (78 pp.)  In bookstore and on book reserve.

  • Yi shuihan. "The Liumang Society," trans. in Barme and Jaivin, eds., New Ghosts, Old Dreams, 1992. (2 pp.) On book reserve. (included in Barme chapter)
  • Zelder, Ken. "Introduction to Part Two", The Subcultures Reader.
  • Zhang Zhen. "Mediating Time: The 'Rice Bowl of Youth' in Fin de Siecle Urban China," Public Culture 12(1), 2000. (20 pp.)

Video Gaming

Music

Online Video

Anti-Chinese Gold Farmers videos

 

 

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Week Twelve - Constructing Gender and Sexuality

Sunday Apr 24- Film assignment: Through Chinese Women's Eyes,(5 pm, Bio 19), 53 min

Tues. Apr 26 Consumer Sexuality and Shifting Gender Identities

  • Evans, Harriet. "Comrade Sisters: Gendered Bodies and Spaces," in Evans and Donald, (Eds.), Picturing Power in the People's Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution. Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 1999. (13 pp.). On book, ereserve
  • Yang, Mayfair. "From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women's Public Sphere in China," in Yang, (Ed.), Spaces of Their Own : Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China (Public Worlds, V. 4). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. (30 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • L.H.M. Ling. "Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of the Asian Woman in Modernity," Positions 7.2, 1999. (29 pp.) Online Project Muse

Thurs Apr. 28 Virtual Gendered Spaces

  • Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Khun Eng Kuah. Intro and Ch. 11, Maggie Leung, "On Sale in Express Package: Chinese Female Bodies as Commodities in Cyberspace," Chinese Women and the Cyberspace, Amsterdam : Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2008. (book, ereserve). (24 pp).
  • Farrer, James. "China's Women Sex Bloggers and Dialogic Sexual Politics on the Chinese Internet," Current Chinese Affairs 4, 2007. (ereserve).

 

  • Andrews, Julia and Kuiyi Shen. "The New Chinese Woman and Lifestyle Magazines in the Late 1990s, " in Link et al, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society.Rowan and Littlefield: 2002. [good overview of progression in images of women on mag. covers]
  • Constable, Nicole. "The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex and Reproductive Labor," Annual Review of Anthropology, 2009.
  • Steve Craig Men, Masculinity and the Media (Men, Masculinity Research Series, Vol 1).
  • Dai Qing and Luo Ke. "A Sexy Lady," trans. in Barme and Jaivin, eds., New Ghosts, Old Dreams, 1992. (18 pp.) On book reserve
  • Erwin, Kathleen. "White Women, Male Desires: a Televi sual Fantasy of the Transnational Chinese Family," in Spaces of their Own. (20 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Evans, Harriet. "Sex and the Open Market," ," in Women and Sexuality in China. New York: Continuum, 1997.
  • Harriet Evans. "Marketing Femininity: Images of the Modern Chinese Woman", Timothy B. Weston and Lionel M. Jensen (eds), China beyond the Headlines (Lanham, etc.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), pp. 217-244.
  • Honig and Hershatter: Ch. 2 "The Pleasures of Adornment and the Dangers of Sexuality" (pp. 41-67) Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. (25 pg). On book reserve.
  • Johansson, Perry. "Selling the 'Modern woman': Consumer Culture and Chinese Gender Politics," in Munshi, ed., Images of the 'Modern Woman' in Asia: Global Media, Local Media. Curzon, 2001. [good b/w prints of images of women in state mags]
  • Shih, Shu-Mei. "Gender and a Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media," in Spaces of their Own. (23 pp.) In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Xu Xiaoqun. "The Discourse on Love, Marriage, and Sexuality in Post-Mao China: A Reading of the Journalistic Literature on Women," in Positions 4.2, 1996.
  • Zhang Zhen. "Mediating Time: The 'Rice Bowl of Youth' in Fin de Siecle Urban China," Public Culture 12(1), 2000. (20 pp.

Debates on Chinese Blogging

 

 

Films in Reed Library

  • Beauty in China. director: Elodie Pakosz; producer: Myrto Grecos ; Hikari Productions
      These days, ambitious young women in China feel they have to Westernize their appearance through plastic surgery in order to get ahead. To accomplish the "right look," they visit surgeons to have their legs lengthened, their eyes westernized, and their breasts enlarged. Some of the women end up with terrible physical problems as a result. Every week some 16,000 Chinese undergo face surgery. The film includes a beauty contest for "Miss Nip & Tuck," in which all the contestants are women who have had plastic surgery. Many of their families have spent their life savings to pay for this investment in their daughters.
  • Half the sky. director: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; producer: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. We learn about the role of Chinese women in a society still dominated by men.
  • Love and sex in China. director: Annamaria Gallone; producer: First Hand Films
    As China changes at an awesome rate, becoming more industrialized, urban and westernized, this film explores how this has impacted traditional relationships between men and women. Our guide is a young journalist, Yang Li Ne, whose parents have just divorced and whose own marriage is unraveling. She speaks about love and sex with young Beijingers, as well as older couples from the villages. Many of the young are afraid of commitment and are cynical about love and marriage. Money, not love, they say, is the basis for marriage. Prostitution is rampant; an estimated 6% of the national revenue comes from prostitution. Older couples reflect on the vanishing traditions that have given their marriages stability. A young gay man who was hesitant to be identified describes the homophobia in Chinese society and the secrecy with which gay and lesbians must lead their lives. He talks about the difference between making love and having sex. Examples of China's traditional erotic art, which was nurtured by the imperial court, are laced through the film.
  • Mardi Gras: made in China. director: David Redmon; producer: David Redmon
    A documentary that explores the production, consumption, and disposal of Mardi Gras beads. Filmed on location in Fuzhou, China and New Orleans, Louisiana, the film follows "The Bead Trail" backwards from the bacchanalia at Mardi Gras to the factories in Fuzhou where the beads are made. When each group is shown images of the other, the cycle of misunderstanding goes a long way in explaining how the commodity chain is kept in place.
  • Trading women. director: David A. Feingold; producer: Dean W. Slotar, David A. Feingold. Narrated by Oscar-winning actress Angelina Jolie, the documentary investigates the trade in minority girls and women from the hill tribes of Burma, Laos and China, into the Thai sex industry. Filmed on location in China, Thailand and Burma, Trading Women follows the trade of women in all its complexity, entering the worlds of brothel owners, trafficked girls, voluntary sex-workers, corrupt police and anxious politicians. The film also explores the international community's response to the issue.
  • Looking for China girl. director: BBC Education & Training; producer: Sophie Todd
    This program raises the question, what happens when women become a rare commodity? China Girl is a documentary that explores China's one child policy which was introduced as a measure to stabilise China's burgeoning population and now has resulted in over 500,000 abortions and many more girls being killed once they have been born. The program looks at the underlying issues, from the increase of professional women in China who have rejected their traditional role, to the overwhelming lack of women in the provinces and why China's crime rate has tripled in the last 20 years, with police struggling with loutish behavior, gangs and the disappearance of young women.

 

 

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Week Thirteen - Chineseness and Contested Nationalisms in the Media Age

Sunday May 1 Film Assignment: Boomtown Beijing (Online)

Tues. May 3  The Olympic Year and Spectacular Nationalism

  • Hubbert, Jennifer. "Spectacular Productions: Community and Commodity in the Beijing Olympics," City and Society 22(1): 119-142. (ereserve). (16 pp).

  • Zhang, Xiaoling(2011) 'From Totalitarianism to Hegemony: the reconfiguration of the party-state and the transformation of Chinese communication', Journal of Contemporary China, 20: 68, 103 — 115. (ereserve)

  • Liebold, Jim. "Duelling Dreams at the 2008 Beijing Olympics," on The China Beat blog, July 2008.

Thurs. May 5 New Hanism and the future of "Multinational" China

 

Final Paper Due Mon, May 16, 5 pm, my office, Vollum 312

Nationalism, Media and Culture (1980s-90s)

  • Barme, Geremie and Jaivin, eds. "River Elegy: TV Politics," in New Ghosts, Old Dreams, 1992.
  • Barme, Geremie.  "Ch. 10: To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic," in In the Red (25 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Barme, Geremie.  "Ch. 12: Totalitarian Nostalgia," in In the Red. (28 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Ben Xu. "From Modernity to Chineseness: the Rise of Nativist Cultural theory in Post-1989 China," in Positions 6:1, 1998. J-STOR
  • ----------. "Contesting Memory for Intellectual Self-Positioning: The 1990's New Cultural Conservatism in China," in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11(1), 1999.
  • Chen Fong-ching. "The Popular Culture Movement of the 1980s," in Davies, ed., Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry. Rowan and Littlefield, 2001.
  • Dai Jinhua.  "Redemption and Consumption: Depicting Culture in the 1990's," in Positions 4:  1, 1996.  (16 pp.)
  • Dutton, Michael.  "Stories of the Fetish: Tales of Chairman Mao," in Streetlife China.  (30 pp.). In bookstore and on book reserve.
  • Garnham "The Mass Media, Cultural Identity, and the Public Sphere in the Modern World," Public Culture 5, 1993: 251-265. (14 pp).
  • Jing Wang. "Heshang and the Paradoxes of the Chinese Enlightenment," in High Culture Fever: Politics Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng's China. Berkeley: Univ. of CA press, 1996 .
  • McLagan, Meg. "Computing for Tibet: Virtual Politics  in the Post-Cold War Era," in Marcus, George, ed. Connected: Engagements with Media. Chicago UPress, 1996.
  • Munson, Todd. "Selling China: www.cnta.com and Cultural Nationalism," in Journal of Multimedia History 2, 1999. Full text online: http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/chinaweb.html
  • Schrift, Melissa. Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge, Rutgers Univ. Press, 2001
  • Wan, Pin.  "A Second Wave of Enlightenment? or an Illusory Nirvana?  Heshang and the Intellectual Movements of the 1980's," and Translation of Part 1 of Heshang.  in Bodman and Wan, (Eds.), Heshang: Deathsong of the River. A Reader's Guide to the Chinese TV Series Heshang.  Ithaca: Cornell Univ. East Asia Program, 1991.  On ereserve.
  • Yang, Mayfair. "Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai," in Ginsburg et al, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: Univ. of CA press, 2002
  • Zhang, Xudong. "Nationalism, Mass Culture, and Intellectual Strategies in Post-Tiananmen China," in Social Text 55, vol. 16(2), Summer 1998. (27 pp.)
  • Zhang, Xudong. "On Some Motifs in Chinese 'Cultural Fever' of the Late 1980's: social Change, Ideology and Theory," in Social Text 39: 129-156, 1994. See me.

Nationalism, Media and Culture (2000s on)

  • Broudehoux on Beijing urban spectacle,
  • Brownell, Susan. 2008. Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China. Rowman and Littlefield.
  • Fong, Vanessa. on Chinese teen's mediated filial nationalism.
  • Jing Wang. Conclusion (leads up to Olympics as brand campaign. Brand New China.
  • Makley, Charlene. 2009. Ballooning Unrest: Tibet, State Violence and the Incredible Lightness of Knowledge. In China in 2008: a Year of Great Significance, Kate Merkel-Hess, Kenneth L. Pommeranz, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, ed.s, Routledge.
  • Merkel-Hess, Kate, Kenneth Pomeranz and Jeffrey N Wasserstrom. 2009. China in 2008: a year of great significance. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
  • Zhou Yongming. Ch. 9 on Military, nat'lism and websites. Historicizing Online Politics.

Coverage of the 2008 Tibet Protests

Timelines

Maps

Coverage and Debates over Beijing Olympics

Wolf Totem: Lu Jiamin (aka Jiang Rong)

Online Video:

Films in Reed Library

  • Beijing 2008: highlights, the games of the XXIX Olympiad [GV742.3 .B456 2008 DVD]
  • Leaving Fear Behind [Catalog]. Secretly filmed in Tibetan regions of the PRC during the run-up to the Olympics in 2007-2008. Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso were arrested following the completion of their documentary film ‘Leaving Fear Behind’ in March 2008. The film was shot inside Tibet and smuggled out at great risk.
  • Petition (Shang Fang) Directed by Zhao Liang, 2009, video, color, 120 min. Mandarin with English subtitles (filmed during the run-up to the Olympics in Beijing).
    The dysfunctional Chinese court system allows citizens with grievances against their local governments to petition the court to clear or correct their record. Yet in order to do so, the petitioners must travel to Beijing to file paperwork and wait an indefinite period to plead their case. The vast majority of petitioners are impoverished villagers who travel far to the capital and typically end up waiting desperately in decrepit shantytowns for their cases to be settled, often pressured by hired thugs to return home. Following the saga of a group of petitioners over the years of 1996 and 2008, Petition unfolds like a novel by Zola or Dickens. Unwilling to accept defeat and seemingly unable to do anything but wait, the petitioners enter a strange and often terrifying zone, gradually losing touch with family and friends back home and with the cruel reality of their situation.

TBA

 

 

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