Deconstructing the Other’s Other: Analyzing the Chinese Female Image in the Film Saving Face

Film Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-100
Author(s):  
Chuyi Zhang

The image of Chinese women portrayed in American films is essentially the West’s imagination of China, conveyed by the female body and constructed in the Orientalist discourse. Over the past one hundred years, Chinese women have been primarily depicted as docile, weak, submissive, voiceless, and in need of being rescued and guided by Occidentals. With the evolution of the global order and the rise of China’s international status, the silent Orient has taken the initiative to resist and reshape this voiceless, “other-ed” image. This article aims to focus on the female characters in Saving Face, an American film directed by Chinese American director Alice Wu in 2004, and analyzes how the director reverses the stereotyped Chinese female image based on the theoretical framework of Orientalism and postcolonial studies, not only “the other” with regards to men, but also “the other” as to the Occident, thus dismantling long-held misreadings of China.

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1363-1379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arif Dirlik

How do we talk about racism, which we must, given its pervasiveness, without erasing significant changes that distinguish the present from the past and, even more important, without contributing to further racialization of the language of social and cultural analysis—and, by implication, to racist discourses? Much has changed over the last half century in the consciousness of racism and in efforts to overcome it. It is obscurantist to overlook these changes and speak of racism today as if it were the racism of earlier times. On the other hand, recent decades have witnessed the globalization of racism, the racialization of social categories, and the proliferation of race talk, which contributes to the reification of race. This article seeks to evaluate the ways in which race talk finds expression in discourses of political economy, labor migration, biogenetics, and neoliberal attacks on the idea of the social, as well as in putatively antiracist arguments in cultural and postcolonial studies that nevertheless contribute to the pervasiveness of race talk. It suggests that contemporary issues of race are best grasped within a condition of global modernity and sees in the restoration of the social a precondition for overcoming political and cultural racialization.


Author(s):  
Graeme Johanson

This chapter describes the field of Development Informatics as it has emerged in the past two decades, and highlights some of the strengths of its research and practices. It draws on the current literature and the expertise of the other authors of this book to help to define a set of basic terms. Any new intellectual domain is tied to some degree to the vagaries of its institutional alliances, to the perceived international status of its public forums, and to the criticism that on its own it lacks unique methodological rigour. These points are discussed candidly. Multidisciplinarity is the backbone of Development Informatics. The main virtues of Development Informatics are that it offers a platform for an evaluative critique to counterbalance the effects of relentless globalisation, that it comprises strong multidisciplinary teams, that it maintains an intellectual space to build on international momentum that has developed among theorists and practitioners, and that it opens up future imaginative possibilities for collaborative projects which involve communities in developing areas of participatory research and ongoing project evaluation in order to encourage self-sustaining entities.


2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned W. Schultz ◽  
Lisa M. Huet

This study examined death as portrayed in different types of American film. Death events were scored for number and type, use of death words, demographic characteristics, 23 different actions of instigators, and 24 reactions of recipients. Trained observers scored 25 popular films, 16 popular/award films, and 24 award films. The predominant depictions of death were attacks by weapon, threats, risks and conversations. Most common reactions in death scenes were fear, shock, protest and aggression. ANOVA comparisons across the three types of films showed that popular and popular/award films contained significantly more sensational death actions, such as non-weapon attacks, threats of death, close calls, risks taken, and accidents. Award films were significantly more likely to include scenes of routine, medical death events. No significant differences in use of language were found. Instigators in death scenes were six times more likely to be males. Female characters were nearly twice as likely to be recipients as instigators. ANOVA comparisons indicated that reactions involving escape, fear, no harm, relief, and ambiguity were significantly more common in popular and popular/award films. Award films, on the other hand, included significantly more expressions of sorrow and sadness. Comparisons based on audience rating (G, PG, PG-13, and R) showed no significant differences in the number of death scenes and virtually no significant differences in specific death actions or reactions. The results present a disturbing picture of death in movies, one described as psychologically obscene. In American film, death is distorted into a sensational stream of violent attacks by males, with fear, injury, further aggression, and the absence of normal grief reactions as the most common responses.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


Author(s):  
Prakash Rao

Image shifts in out-of-focus dark field images have been used in the past to determine, for example, epitaxial relationships in thin films. A recent extension of the use of dark field image shifts has been to out-of-focus images in conjunction with stereoviewing to produce an artificial stereo image effect. The technique, called through-focus dark field electron microscopy or 2-1/2D microscopy, basically involves obtaining two beam-tilted dark field images such that one is slightly over-focus and the other slightly under-focus, followed by examination of the two images through a conventional stereoviewer. The elevation differences so produced are usually unrelated to object positions in the thin foil and no specimen tilting is required.In order to produce this artificial stereo effect for the purpose of phase separation and identification, it is first necessary to select a region of the diffraction pattern containing more than just one discrete spot, with the objective aperture.


2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
Alexander Carpenter

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg’s curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn’s influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. This paper argues that Schoenberg failed to explicitly recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, with one foot in the past and one in the future. In his voluminous writings on music, Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg’s theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn’s music, he invokes — with tacit negativity — its accessibility, counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven’s, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg also praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and harmonic exploration. Haydn thus appears in Schoenberg’s writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: a key member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded a peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kempe Ronald Hope

Countries with positive per capita real growth are characterised by positive national savings—including government savings, increases in government investment, and strong increases in private savings and investment. On the other hand, countries with negative per capita real growth tend to be characterised by declines in savings and investment. During the past several decades, Kenya’s emerging economy has undergone many changes and economic performance has been epitomised by periods of stability, decline, or unevenness. This article discusses and analyses the record of economic performance and public finance in Kenya during the period 1960‒2010, as well as policies and other factors that have influenced that record in this emerging economy. 


2019 ◽  
pp. 446-461
Author(s):  
Ekaterina Baydalova

The postcolonial studies have been under discussion in the Ukrainian historiography, social science, culture studies and literary criticism since 1990 years. They have originated from American, European, and Australian academic studies and became more and more popular in modern Ukrainian culture recently. The nation and the nationalism, Orientalism, multicultural and ambivalent individuality self-presentation, the search of cultural identity, the problem of ambivalent attitude to the past are in the paradigm of postcolonial studies. The problems of national identity, the totalitarian past, the interactions with neighboring countries especially Russia and Poland, the instable Ukrainian society’s condition are analyzed under the postcolonial ideas in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse. The postcolonial theory has become the main interpretative strategy of the Ukrainian researchers lately. Nevertheless, there is no unconditional modus vivendi in the Ukrainian academia about postcolonial conceptions, strategies and principles. One of the most important unsolved issues is the question of correlation of postcolonial and postmodern components of the Ukrainian national literature. The inclusion of the studies of trauma and anticolonial and posttotalitarian discourses into the framework of the postcolonial studies is the most distinguishing feature of postcolonial studies in the Ukraine.


1999 ◽  
Vol 150 (12) ◽  
pp. 484-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolf Hockenjos

Concepts of near-natural forestry are in great demand these days. Most German forest administrations and private forest enterprises attach great importance to being as «near-natural» as possible. This should allow them to make the most of biological rationalisation. The concept of near-natural forestry is widely accepted, especially by conservationists. However, it is much too early to analyse how successful near-natural forestry has been to date, and therefore to decide whether an era of genuine near-natural forest management has really begun. Despite wide-spread recognition, near-natural forestry is jeopardised by mechanised timber harvesting, and particularly by the large-timber harvester. The risk is that machines, which are currently just one element of the timber harvest will gain in importance and gradually become the decisive element. The forest would then be forced to meet the needs of machinery, not the other way round. Forests would consequently become so inhospitable that they would bear no resemblance to the sylvan image conjured up by potential visitors. This could mean taking a huge step backwards: from a near-natural forest to a forest dominated by machinery. The model of multipurpose forest management would become less viable, and the forest would become divided into areas for production, and separate areas for recreation and ecology. The consequences of technical intervention need to be carefully considered, if near-natural forestry is not to become a thing of the past.


Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document