Vilnius Cinematic Spaces: Eitvydas Doškus’ Dialogue with Almantas Grikevičius in Once Upon a Vilnius

Reviewed by: Studies in Honor of Robert ter Horst by Eleanor ter Horst, Edward Friedman, and Ali Shehzad Zaidi Adrienne L. Martín Eleanor ter Horst, Edward Friedman, and Ali Shehzad Zaidi. Studies in Honor of Robert ter Horst TRANSFORMATIVE STUDIES INSTITUTE, 2017. 180 PP. THE ELEVEN ESSAYS COLLECTED IN THIS FESTSCHRIFT pay tribute to the career, scholarship, and character of Professor Robert ter Horst, echoing what Edward H. Friedman calls his "indisputably baroque sensibility" (3), evidenced in ter Horst's profound erudition, eloquent expression, and inimitable style. Eleanor ter Horst opens the collection with a poignant personal portrait of a life dedicated to literature and passed from father to daughter, one well lived and devoted "to the twin vices of reading and writing" (2). Two other brief personal tributes by Friedman and Ali Shehzad Zaidi corroborate appreciatively ter Horst's legacy as colleague and mentor, venerated teacher, and friend. The essays range over a variety of topics, literatures, and genres—prose, poetry, film, and especially drama—that reflect ter Horst's varied comparative interests and published work. Those focusing on drama begin with William R. Blue's "On the Road: Traveling in the Comedia," which explores the material reality, symbolic worth, and character building effects of travel in a series of plays by dramatists such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Rojas Zorilla. Blue contextualizes these plays in writings by contemporary commentators who recounted the material challenges faced by travelers in early modern Spain. He concludes that such "road plays" portray the characters in transition, in a dynamic space that allows them to explore their options, identities, and values. Focusing perceptively on the performative aspects of drama, Patricia Kenworthy's "La dama duende and the 'Reversible' Corral Stage" examines space and staging conventions in Calderón's play. By addressing various critical determinations regarding the central prop—the perplexing alacena—as well as the positioning and timing of exits and entrances, Kenworthy points to the critical need for greater editorial rigor in analyzing dramatists' directions and staging patterns in order to enhance our appreciation of their virtuosity. To do so will fill the analytical blanks left by studies that do not take performance into consideration when evaluating drama. [End Page 141] Randolph D. Pope also examines Calderón in "The Mute Testimony of Portraits in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's and Miguel de Unamuno's Work." He expands sensitively on the theme of ter Horst's article "The Second Self: Painting and Sculpture in the Plays of Calderón" (in Calderón de la Barca at the Tercentenary: Comparative Views, edited by Wendell M. Aycock and Sydney P. Cravens, Texas Tech UP, 1982, pp. 175–92), central within the large body of work our colleague dedicates to Calderón, which maintains that the playwright's attention to painting and sculpture is a manifestation of his aesthetic appreciation of art. Pope analyzes in detail the presence of portraits and their function in Unamuno's Niebla and Abel Sánchez: una historia de pasión as well as in Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, putting these works into philosophical and aesthetic dialogue with Calderón. By analyzing the "mute testimony" (107) such portraits provide in their differing "languages of silence," this article scrutinizes those writers' commentary on the problematic disparities between model versus portrait, original versus copy, life versus dream, and, ultimately, life versus art. Eleanor ter Horst's "The Conjugations of Don Juan" also engages productively with a previous article by ter Horst, "Epic Decent: The Filiations of Don Juan" (MLN, vol.111, 1996, pp. 255–75), in which he finds male rivalry to be a structuring element of both Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla and José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio. Eleanor ter Horst expands on this idea of competition (between father and son, understood broadly) and the interplay between similarity and difference in her examination of two other versions of Don Juan—Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and E. T. A. Hoffman's novella Don Juan—and Goethe's Faust, focusing on "the indeterminacy of relationships between texts, between music and language, between various spoken languages, between men...

Since the 1960s, anime on both film and television has become a part of global screen culture. It is Miyazaki Hayao who may take the credit for being the most highly regarded anime filmmaker known across the world. The global popularity and success of his films encourage us to link his works to transnationalism. But is Miyazaki transnational only because of his global popularity? There is another perspective in which we may take Miyazaki’s transnationalism: through film aesthetics and narrative, for his works may be said to enable mobile fantasy. While discussing transnationalism, many film studies scholars focus on the discussion of film production, distribution, exhibition and reception in relation to economic globalization. Mette Hjort points out the complication and sometimes confusion in the way that transnationalism is defined. She argues the term transnationalism is often used to describe “a series of assumptions about the networked and globalized realities that are those of a contemporary situation.” These assumptions, however, do not define transnationalism explicitly. The reality of economic globalization is a space we are well aware of. I am more interested, however, in studying how cinematic transnationalization takes place in the space of an imaginary. Apart from political, cultural and economic enterprises, transnational magic is also embedded in film aesthetics, narrative and its psychological effects on audiences. It is in this connection that I propose a notion of what I will call mobile fantasy. This chapter will first re-conceptualise the theory of transnational cinema in order to link transnationalism to a notion of imaginary space and to mobile fantasy. It will then focus on Miyazaki’s works as a case study, by looking into two main characteristics of his films – the question of a surreal world, and the theme of childhood.

This study explores how rap and hip-hop artists construct a sense of “coolness” and engage in performativity within the cultural context of Kerala. By integrating both local and global influences, these artists establish unique fashion identities, which are analyzed through their Instagram profiles, YouTube videos, and live performances. Fashion, in this context, is conceptualized as a socio-cultural phenomenon shaped by multiple intersecting factors. Historically, films have played a significant role in shaping fashion trends in Kerala, a southern state of India. Cinematic representations have influenced public perceptions of clothing, grooming, and self-presentation, with audiences often emulating the attire and hairstyles of film protagonists. However, contemporary trends indicate a shift from cinema to digital platforms, particularly rap music videos and social media, as key sites for fashion discourse. These platforms facilitate intercultural and cross-cultural engagements, allowing artists to experiment with clothing, accessories, body modifications, hairstyles, and overall aesthetics. Unlike the conventional body representations often depicted in mainstream cinema, rappers and social media influencers introduce diverse fashion expressions that merge global and local stylistic elements. The fashion choices adopted by these artists are not merely aesthetic but also serve as markers of community, regional identity, religious affiliation, and caste dynamics. By embodying these varied influences, Kerala’s hip-hop artists contribute to the evolving discourse on identity, representation, and cultural hybridity in contemporary fashion.

The writings of the German–Jewish social /cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) have been overshadowed until recently by those of his contemporaries and colleagues, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Indeed, all too often judged exclusively on the basis of his post-war English-language writings on film and cinema, Kracauer has long been misread and maligned in the Anglophone academy as a naive ‘realist’ film theorist. Fortunately, this erroneous assessment is now changing. Renewed interest in Critical Theory and its Frankfurt School exponents is leading to a growing appreciation of the originality, subtlety and complexity of Kracauer’s works and especially his earlier essays penned as a journalist / feuilletonist for the Frankfurter Zeitung during the Weimar Republic. In these fragmentary texts, Kracauer provides an intriguing and insightful critique of modern metropolitan mass culture, identifying the formation and pre-eminence of new class groupings in the contemporary city and interrogating the conditions and qualities of everyday urban experience itself. This essay does not provide a general introduction to Kracauer’s work or overview of his themes, but rather explores one key motif with which he was preoccupied throughout his writings: the evocative yet elusive concept of ‘improvisation’. Strongly influenced by his erstwhile tutor in Berlin, the sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, Kracauer presents a pessimistic vision of metropolitan modernity, a system and a space in which increasingly powerful forms of rationalisation, calculation and abstraction lead to the atomisation, overstimulation and eventual indifference of the spiritually impoverished urban individual. Yet Kracauer is also attentive to what he sees as positive, indeed perhaps utopian, moments lodged in this otherwise bleak and forbidding environment. In its confusion and profusion of chance encounters and contingencies, the modern city is where the fortuitous, the haphazard and accidental take on a particular significance, ephemeral conjunctions and configurations best captured, kracauer contents, by the new medium of film. This paper traces how Kracauer comes to see the improvisional (literally: the ‘unforseen’), as both a necessary and a critical response to the exigencies of metropolitan living. As a spatial, bodily, material and temporal practice, improvisation draws upon the playfulness and imagination of children’s fairytales and of slapstick comedy to suggest possibilities and potentialities transcending the alienated, mechanised, commodified life-world of modernity. In presenting us with images of improvisation, the films of comics such as Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin, envision a world of renewed and non-instrumental relations between humans and objects, of revived and benign relations between humans and Nature. These are ludic realms in which the powerful are outwitted by the weak and downtrodden, and human ‘character’ serendipitously triumphs over fate and death. The paper concludes with some brief reflections on the critical, utopian promise of the improvisional conceived as the ad lib.

Reviewed by: Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960 by Nilo Couret Lisa Shaw (bio) Mock Classicism: Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960 by Nilo Couret. University of California Press. 2018. $85.00 hardcover. $34.95 paper; also available in e-book. 296 pages. Comedy is a genre often said not to travel well. Undeterred, Nilo Couret declares in the opening pages of Mock Classicism, "This book not only discusses where comedy is from but also what it says and what it does."1 Couret's book addresses the question of how extremely popular, commercially successful films negotiate local and global cultural influences. His central thesis is that such films function as responses to modernization from the periphery. As the author writes, "Mock Classicism addresses the impasse in film studies regarding how to speak about local cultural practice in nonessentialist terms and avoids producing world cinema either as defensive authentic cultural expression or as derivative of foreign (i.e., Hollywood) models."2 The book's title plays on both the verb and the adjectival form of the word "mock," and its contents explore how Latin American comedies poke fun at classical Hollywood and produce a mock-classical cinema particular to their own geographical context. Couret makes an important, scholarly addition to the bibliography on Latin American popular cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, and film comedy more broadly, by arguing that Latin American film comedies produce a classical mode of spectatorship that differs from the classicism figured in Hollywood. As the author observes: "Comedy proves difficult to reconcile with the classical precisely because of its relation to the texture of experience. If comedy functions as a limit case in these classical Hollywood debates, then perhaps Latin American comedy can offer a similar heuristic value in delineating a mode of address particular to Latin American cinema."3 [End Page 194] Each of the chapters in Mock Classicism combines close reading of a selection of films, empirical research, film theory, and Latin American studies. The range of film theorists whose ideas inform but are also interrogated in Couret's work is impressive. Drawing from the ideas of Miriam Hansen, for example, he argues that "the inability of comedy to travel well complicates the circulatory dynamics of the vernacular in vernacular modernism and problematizes its transnational and comparative frame."4 The author equally engages with Latin Americanist debates on transculturation and posthegemony, arguing for a "politics of spectatorship that makes the experience of modernity sensuously graspable," and with the recent uptake of affect theory in Latin American film studies.5 In dialogue with Laura Podalsky, Couret traces the epistemological crisis she identifies in the contemporary moment to early cinema in the region, arguing that "comedies' parodic textuality, intermedial production, variable circulation in space, and specific reception in and across time offer possible sites of disjunction within an apparatus considered paradigmatically to articulate the nation-state."6 Challenging the traditional approach to Latin American film history, this book rejects the constraints of "nationness" and avoids using genre theory or a chronological approach, centering instead on the formal and narrative operations of film comedies from various Latin American countries and their circulation within and between diverse national contexts.7 Unsurprisingly, it nevertheless explores comedic figures and tropes that are conventionally aligned with specific nations, not least the Mexican star Mario "Cantinflas" Moreno, the focus of the opening chapter, which revisits his popular comedies from the golden age of Mexican cinema. This chapter challenges the interpretation of Cantinflas's films as escapist and ideologically suspect, arguing instead that they "represent peripheral spaces of subversive difference that in their cultural and historical specificity cannot be easily co-opted by a cultural-imperialist center."8 Analyzing in detail Cantinflas's first successful film, Ahí está el detalle (You're Missing the Point; Juan Bustillo Oro, 1940), Couret explores the star's characteristic linguistic play and the film's textual instabilities. This consummate example of popular film analysis demonstrates convincingly how this comedian's appeal relied on the avoidance of intelligibility and how "this film comedy more broadly complicates the denotative nature of classical film language and frustrates narrative-cognitive approaches to spectatorship."9 (The detailed analysis...

This study investigates Afrofuturism as a cultural aesthetic that combines science fiction, history, and fantasy in order to envision the African diaspora's experiences and possible futures. While Afrofuturism is intended to reflect global Black culture, it often centers on African- American connections to speculative narratives, thereby narrowing its broader cultural scope. Focusing on Black Panther as a case study, this study analyzes the impact of cultural imperialism in Afrofuturistic film. This study explores the preservation, representation, and commodification of authentic African heritage in Afrofuturistic movies founded on Afrofuturist and Pan-Africanist theories. The study conducts a comparative thematic analysis of music, visual appeal, social and cultural framing, and language in Black Panther to examine how they contribute to the film's representation of an African identity. It tries to ascertain whether the representations adhere to or deviate from hegemonic discourses on Africa, hence asserting the tension between cultural preservation and commercialisation of identity fueled by Western forces. This analytic narrative suggests Afrofuturism serves a double function; It is both a means of cultural recovery and a commercially viable genre which commands a wider global influence. This study, therefore, reflects on the wider significance of Afrofuturism for popular African cultural understandings outside Black Panther and in global contexts.

Before I introduce the individual films and their historical context, as well as their formal characteristics, I would like to provide an overview of Vertov’s film theory, which, especially in the early years, he repeatedly promoted in manifestos and lectures. In part influenced by the constructivists and the futurists, Vertov rejected the aesthetic category of the composition of a work of art. The artist was no longer to be perceived as the creator, but as an engineer and constructor who must solve the technical problems of his artistic production in an active process. The accent is on the process-related serial nature of the procedure and on the rational control of the material’s treatment. Vertov adopted the concept of factography (“literatura fakta”), developed by futurism and formalism, and attempted to apply it to the medium of film. Like other revolutionary film-makers, Eisenstein and Vertov wanted to escape the then-customary division of genres into melodrama, adventure film or slapstick and found various solutions to the problem. Eisenstein proclaimed his theory of the “montage of attractions” and moved from the films of agitation and attraction to a hybrid which linked moments of melodrama and documentary film together. By contrast, Vertov began from the newsreel genre, as it was at first the only one to achieve the presentation of actualities required by the factographs, and, using his form of editing, developed from it a kind of rhythmical poetic documentary film.

Based on empirical material and sociological research, the article analyzes the process of search, the formation of religious identity by modern human in the context of globalization. The ambiguity of the formation of religious identity is due to a complex combination of different factors. Thus, the ambiguity of the process gives rise to a variety of approaches in the modern vision, understanding and explanation of religious identity. They are formed in the process of constant correlation of religious and non-religious in modern religiosity. In the study of religious identity in the context of globalization, the author draws attention not only to the unifying tendencies of globalization, but also to its consequence – glocalization, which manifests itself in the religious sphere through differentiation, fragmentation, localization, cultural unification, primitivization of tastes, consumption. It is stated, firstly, that religious identity experiences constant transformations that correspond to changes in the cultural horizon. It is formed under the influence of a number of phenomena, among which we can point to religious fundamentalism, religious indifferentism (polarization of religion); extra-church searches for religious identity, as a consequence – re-individualism, eclecticism and “patchwork” of religious ideas, syncretism of perception of religion, pluralization of religious space, etc. Secondly, the assumption that the traditional process of formation of religious identity is not implemented in the contemporary cultural environment – neither at the personal nor at the community level – is increasingly confirmed. Religious identity is not thought of as a permanent characteristic, but as a result of a fundamentally open process of religious identification.

حفظ ارزش‌های شهری و چگونگی تبدیل آنها به هویت شهر، دغدغه‌ی بسیاری از متخصصان شهرشناسی در عصر اطلاعات، ارتباطات و جهانی شدن است. زیرا هنوز اندیشه‌ی نفی گذشته ، در مضامین بسیاری از طرح‌های توسعه‌ی شهری وجود دارد و ارزش را در ساخت‌های کالبدی دارای استحکام سازه‌ای، نه در چیز دیگری، جستجو می‌کنند. هدف این پژوهش در مرحله‌ی اول بیان مفهوم ، سلسله مراتب و اهمیت ارزش‌ها در هویت‌سازی شهری با ارایه‌ی شواهدی از عناصر کالبدی شهری جهان است. در مرحله‌ی دوم با توجه به اهمیت ارزش‌ها و هویت‌های شهری در تقویت فرهنگ محلی و ملی در عصر جهانی شدن ، ارزش‌های شهری در مشهد، که شدیدا در معرض نابودی در نتیجه‌ی اقدامات گسترده نوسازی است ، با تکمیل 412 پرسشنامه از سه گروه زایران(104 تن) ، کسبه (199 تن )و شهروندان (109 تن) در 12 منطقه‌ی شهرداری مشهد، اطلاعات مربوط به ارزش‌های شهری جمع آوری و نتایج با استفاده از الگوهای آماری از جمله تکنیک تحلیل اوریانس، تحلیل گردید. نتایج نشان از شناسایی 53 نقطه‌ی با ارزش شهری در سه نوع الگوی پراکنش محوری(12محور) ، محوطه ای(19 مجموعه) و بنا (22 بنا)می باشد .همچنین در این مطالعه نقاط باارزش به لحاظ ماهیت موضوع به هشت موضوع تقسیم بندی شدند ، که نقاط با ارزش به لحاظ مذهبی ، گردشگری ، تجاری-بازرگانی و تاریخی در اولویت اول تا چهارم این نقاط قرار گرفتند. شامل عناصر با ارزشی مانند حرم مطهر حضرت رضا(ع) در مرحله‌ی اول ، به لحاظ مذهبی ، طرقبه به لحاظ گردشگری ، بازار امام رضا(ع) به لحاظ تجاری و توس به لحاظ تاریخی شد. تفاوت معنی داری بین کسبه ، شهروندان و زایران در خصوص موضوع‌های با ارزش (هشت موضوع ) مشاهده شده است. ارزش‌های گردشگری و مذهبی بین گروههای پاسخ گو تفاوت معنی‌داری نداشته و دارای اعتبار یکسانی بودند. بنابراین می‌توانند در اولویت قرار گیرند. نقاط باارزش شهری دیگری مانند حمام و مسجد شاه ، سرای عزیزالله اف ، مصلی پایین خیابان و غیره وجود دارد ، که از چشم پاسخ گویان پنهان مانده است و نیازمند توجه می‌باشد. کلید واژه ها: شهر مشهد ، شناسایی ، نقاط با ارزش هویت

The development of tourism in China is a relatively recent and rapidly evolving phenomenon This study focusses on one expanding and diversifying group, that of young Chinese independent or self-organised travellers. Despite some initial studies, relatively little is known about this rapidly growing group of travellers, many of whom share the characteristics of both backpackers and independent travellers. Even less is known about the gazes of professional hosts on this emerging group of Chinese tourists. This PhD’s consideration of ‘gazing’ and ‘performing’, aims to provide new conceptual and empirical understandings into young Chinese independent travellers and professional hosts. Young independent Chinese travellers are increasingly visiting Pai, a small town in northern Thailand, in part influenced by the popularity of the 2009 Thai movie ‘Pai in Love’. Drawing upon participant observation and in-depth interviews of Chinese travellers and Thai hosts, the findings reveal that tourist photography is central to Chinese tourism in Pai, with many performances revolving around the creation of online self-identities of prosperity and globalisation, love and alternative social identities. Most host performances were restricted to host-guest service encounters and were often habitual, highly scripted and shaped by cultural values. Gaze wise, many Chinese gazes were shallow and highly influenced by media and cinematic representations of Thailand. In contrast, Thai professional host gazes were often rigorous and penetrating, and for those hosts who had no real meaningful contact with tourists, highly influenced by their corporeal proximity to the embodied actions of Chinese travellers. This is the first study to consider both performing and gazing alongside each other, and along with consideration of affordances, provides new insights into young Chinese tourism consumption, particularly the extent to which it is influenced by social media, online guides and place ‘myths’. This study also attempts to challenge some of the ethnocentric basis of tourism theory by seeking to challenge some of the modernist and Western assumptions that still theoretically dominate.

This qualitative study examines the names of 100 local and independent businesses to study the linguistic diversity and features of the linguistic landscape in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The names here refer to those written in specific languages used in Aceh (Indonesian, Acehnese, English, Arabic, and other indigenous languages spoken in the province). The data was collected from five main roads, capturing the shop names for analysis. The results show that English is the dominant language choice, composing a majority of 45% of signage, showing the influence of globalization and the desire for international appeal. While English appears to convey prestige, some businesses blend it with Indonesian or Acehnese, connecting with local culture and engaging diverse audiences. This deliberate language choice reflects a commitment to cultural preservation and authentic customer experiences. Meanwhile, diverse linguistic combinations, emphasizing global influences, cultural preservation, and strategic branding, were also revealed. The most prevalent linguistic structure of signs is product+X (57%), which highlights product types, followed by place+X (14%) which emphasizes regional or cultural identity. In addition, a name/person’s name+X establishes a personalized connection (6%). Finally, in language markers, shop names reveal globalization’s prevalence and demonstrate efforts to convey a global image. The revitalization marker reflects the commitment to the Acehnese language and cultural pride. Identity markers, which include place, name, abbreviation, product, plant name, and brand, establish trust, familiarity, and resonance, creating a dynamic linguistic and cultural landscape where businesses steer global influences and local heritage to connect authentically with customers. To conclude, shop names in Banda Aceh illustrate a vibrant linguistic and cultural environment where businesses use global influences and local heritage to create meaningful bonds with customers.

Reviewed by: Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925 Harald Salomon Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925. By Aaron Gerow. University of California Press, 2010. 344 pages. Hardcover $60.00/£41.95; softcover $24.95/£16.95. Motion pictures, wrote the poet Yanagisawa Ken in September 1918, move the hearts of the general population more powerfully than the lofty ideas expressed by Woodrow Wilson (about human liberty) or Leo Tolstoy (about pacifism). His enthusiastic testimonial to the societal impact of cinema was in reaction to a call by the editors of the monthly periodical Chūō kōron. The influential journal had invited numerous "men of culture" to comment on the most prominent symbols of modern life, namely, motion pictures, automobiles, and cafés. Other commentators displayed a different attitude toward contemporary Japanese cinema. They complained about the distasteful atmosphere of theaters and criticized the clamor of film narrators who provided superfluous explanations for inferior "moving pictures" (katsudō shashin) produced domestically. Such comments echoed the criticisms of [End Page 184] the Pure Film Movement (Jun Eigageki Undō), which is the focus of Aaron Gerow's Visions of Japanese Modernity. Gerow, the author of this thoroughly researched and visually appealing book, taught for several years at Yokohama National University and Meiji Gakuin University. In 2004, he joined the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches in the Film Studies Program and in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He has published numerous articles on such topics as early Japanese film, contemporary directors, censorship, nationalism, and the representation of minorities in Japanese cinema. His previous monographs focused on the director Kitano Takeshi and the silent film Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness; 1926).1 A particularly important contribution to the field is also his Research Guide to Japanese Film (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2009), coauthored with Abé Mark Nornes. Recently, he acted as guest editor for a special issue on Japanese film theory published by the Review of Japanese Culture and Society. Visions of Japanese Modernity evolved out of a Ph.D. dissertation presented to the University of Iowa in 1996. The resulting book is a tour de force in the study of early Japanese film culture. Characterizing this tome are a well-structured argumentation, carefully selected images, and a comprehensive index that illustrates the book's impressive thematic repertoire. The vibrancy of early Japanese cinema is legend. Any attempt to approach this cinematic heritage, however, must grapple with the challenge that virtually no physical evidence of the films remains. In discussing source materials supporting the study of Japanese silent film, Mariann Lewinsky has estimated that fewer than one percent of those produced are extant.2 This is partly a result of business practices of that era. The number of prints per film was kept low, and after its release in urban entertainment centers a print would be screened in provincial cities and rural areas until it literally fell apart. The remaining fragments, relates Gerow, would be cut and sold at temple fairs. Other authors have had to face the problem of sources as well. Joanne Bernardi, for example, who has also written about the Pure Film Movement, made a virtue of necessity and demonstrated the promise of film scenarios as source material.3 Gerow, however, goes one step further and embarks on a "discursive history" of early Japanese film. In the thirty-nine-page introduction to the book, he reviews approaches to the study of early cinema and modernity in Japan and other nations. Against this backdrop, the author develops an innovative project that draws on Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, and historical perspectives on film formulated by scholars such as Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Iwamoto Kenji, and Komatsu Hiroshi. Earlier histories of Japanese cinema, holds Gerow, focused on textual or auteurist analyses of film style and generally featured a "reflectionist" model of the interactions between cinema and society (pp. 4-5). By comparison, Visions of Japanese Modernity explicitly turns to "the discursive basis on which films would have been created, watched, understood, and discussed" (p. 7). Thus, oral and...

Mo Yan’s historical novel Sandalwood Death revisits the Boxer Uprising, exploring a local structure of feeling from the point of view of oral transmissions that, one hundred years after the events, appears gradually to be receding into oblivion. It is a project of recuperation or, rather, aesthetic reconstruction of local knowledge. The staging of a variety of local performances, such as Maoqiang opera, seasonal festivals, military and religious parades, as well as of scenes of excessive violence in executions and battle scenes, appears to be a strategy for the cultural reclamation of these local experiences. The story challenges the ingrained dualism between foreign, modern imperialist and nationalist forms of rationality, and pre-modern, local patterns of behaviour and thought. Employing polyphony and multivalent historical representtations, the novel aspires to portray the social dynamics in a given geohistorical circumstances by measuring the spatiotemporal as well as the cognitive distance between the witnessed event, the testifying witness and the future receivers of the transmitted stories. Thus, the inquiry does not focus on the historical events as facts, but rather on their cultural afterlife in (founding) narratives. In times of a growing gap between the modernist vision of human liberation and the actual conditions of growing inequality, delegitimization and dispossession, this tale of unrest in the wake of globalization has as much to say about the world’s peoples around the year 2000, when the novel was published, as about the microcosm of Shandong Gaomi County around the year 1900, when the historical events took place. Taking into account that the novel was written as a local Maoqiang opera in the making and that theatres are major providers of cultural space for the enactment of the human self as the subject of history, Sandalwood Death can perhaps best be described as a theatre of reclamation.

The authors of this paper analyze the Dabkeh al Djoufieh (Dabkɛ ālǧwofyɛ) in its capacity as an inherent part of Jordanian folklore that has been seldom studied. Whereas contemporary Jordan has experienced a rapid burst of cultural globalization, the rural song and dance of Dabkeh al Djoufieh can be observed as a highly dynamic manifestation of belonging and as a symbol of national solidarity. One of the defining features of the Dabkeh al Djoufieh is that it is immanent in every social event in Arab communities. Secondly, as a sample of folk music, Dabkeh al Djoufieh continues to be a vibrant resource for contemporary audiences. The paper focuses on the main musical and poetic characteristics of Dabkeh al Djoufieh. The qualitative analysis applied integrates ideas concerning semantics as a representation of the social context and ethnic identities, whereas music is viewed as an indicator of local heritage. This paper probes the questions: What is Dabkeh Djoufieh? Where does it originate? And how is it implemented in Jordanian folklore culture? Furthermore, the study discusses the social power found within poetic folk verse, specifically, the role of the metaphor as a tool for expressing communal realities and individual experiences. Likewise, the study analyzes the musical features of the traditional Dabkeh al Djoufieh and how it moved across generations, sacred and social boundaries, becoming a symbol of Jordanian folk tradition.

This research explores the dynamics of identity culture in Southeast Asia, focusing on how globalization affects and shapes cultural identities in the region. Using a literature review approach, this study analyzes various literature sources to identify key themes related to cultural diversity, the influence of globalization, and cultural hybridity. Key findings show that Southeast Asia has a rich cultural diversity, with each country in the region displaying unique traditions and customs. However, globalization brings challenges in the form of cultural homogenization that threatens local uniqueness. Nonetheless, Southeast Asian societies also demonstrate adaptability through cultural hybridity, reflecting the merger of traditional and global elements. This research highlights the importance of preserving local culture while participating in the flow of globalization and proposes policies that support cultural education as well as the preservation of local heritage. These findings provide new insights into how cultural identities in Southeast Asia continue to evolve and transform amid global change.