Thursday, September 1, 2016

"The End of Fantasy: Framing State TV within Chinese Documentaries"

My essay "The End of Fantasy: Framing State TV within Chinese Documentaries" is now published online (at this link here) by, and thanks to, the China Policy Institute based at the University of Nottingham.

The essay was inspired by locating differences between documentary techniques and state television strategies while attending a conference in the summer of 2014 when Chinese documentarian Wu Wenguang joined a group of film scholars at the "The Tangled Dynamics of Independent Filmmaking in Contemporary China: Wu Wenguang 吴文光 as Artist in Residence at UC San Diego" conference from June 16-22.

I was grateful to attend and participate in the weeklong event alongside excellent scholars and organizers Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang. Each day we watched hours of documentary footage, including Li Ning’s Tape and Wu Wenguang’s films and more, and in the afternoon we discussed ideas, theories, and questions with Wu Wenguang who responded graciously and kept the ideas rolling. The essay is an excerpt of a longer piece written in response to the numerous films we watched and the conversations inspired by Wu Wenguang’s oeuvre.

An article on the pioneering documentary filmmaking work of Wu Wenguang can be located here. And below is a brief video clip available online:

"Taiwan Cinema" & "Taiwan Literature" Encyclopedia Entries

I am pleased to announce the publication of two encyclopedia entries on the topics of "Taiwan Cinema" and "Taiwan Literature" in a volume just released:

Pop Culture in Asia and Oceania, edited by Jeremy A. Murray and Kathleen M. Nadeau.
A link to the website is located here.


As stated on the publisher ABC-CLIO's website:

"This entertaining introduction to Asian pop culture covers the global superstars, music idols, blockbuster films, and current trends—from the eclectic to the underground—of East Asia and South Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Pakistan, as well as Oceania. The rich content features an exploration of the politics and personalities of Bollywood, a look at how baseball became a huge phenomenon in Taiwan and Japan, the ways in which censorship affects social media use in these regions, and the influence of the United States on the movies, music, and Internet in Asia."