Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.
When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.
This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of contemporary Japan and Taiwan. Moving beyond the East-West paradigm that has traditionally dominated comparativism, the volume explores these literatures within the regional frame.
This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of Japan and Taiwan, 1960-1990. Moving beyond the East-West framework that has traditionally dominated comparative enquiry, the volume sets out to explore contemporary East Asian literature on its own terms. As such, it belongs to the newly emerging area of inter-Asian cultural studies, but is the first full-length monograph to explore this field through the prism of literature. The book combines close readings of paradigmatic texts with in-depth analysis of the historical, social, and ideological contexts in which these works are situated, and explores the form and function of literary practice within the “miracle” societies of industrialized East Asia.
Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.
When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms—remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos—as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.
The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.
This first collection of Margaret Mead's personal correspondence creates a vivid and intimate portrait of an American icon--with a foreword by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.
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