Search

In Orientalism, we encounter common stereotypes that depict the East as an unknown exotic landscape. However, it was more typical of pre-modern societies, when the church greatly distorted information about the Orient, even today we are unfortunately met with enthusiastic applause from the masses. Therefore, its forms are various: it appears e.g. in music videos by world-famous artists. I also focus on Orientalism in music in this paper, which concentrates on an audiovisual clone of David Bowie’s (1947–2016) song China Girl, created in 1984. The main part in it is played by a model of Chinese origin born in New Zealand. In addition, the video clip captures several elements of Orientalism deliberately creating the resulting exotic mood. This paper will therefore focus on their origin in Asian cultures, especially China. Subsequently, I will try to find out to what extent Orientalism is used in the music video. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese cuisine, considered a uniform style of food preparation, still survives in Czech pubs as "China": cheap meat fried with vegetables, glistening in a pool of soy sauce, glued with potato starch, or inlaid with old peanuts in the already populated "Czech Gongbao". But those who have visited China and its ubiquitous canteens could understand that the reality is seriously different. And it could happen to them that even the rampage of the beast of Globalization with the sisters of Unification and Standardization still did not bring Chinese cuisine to a single norm. Still, every Chinese region and every subculture retains its otherness. To describe those differences is the primary purpose of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes Jue Qing's (1917-1962) first piece of historical fiction, the 1942 short story "Chang'an cheng de youyu" (Melancholy in Chang'an). It explores the sources of the story in premodern Chinese literature - Broken Mirror (Benshi shi), Lu Yong (Taiping guangji), Jiao hong ji and Du Shiniang Angrily Sinks Her Jewel-Box (Jing shi tong yan) and compares them with Jue Qing's updated version. This study suggests that "Melancholy in Chang'an" can be read as an allegory of grief over the failure of the Manchukuo project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protagonist of the American movie Karate Kid (Harald Zwart, 2010) is 12-yearold Dre Parker – Jaden Smith (1998), who has to move with his mother from Detroit to China. He has great difficulty making friends with his peers because a bunch of boys from school bully him. Eventually, he becomes close with his classmate Meiying, but their friendship encounters a barrier of difference between the two geographically distant cultures. Mr. Han, portrayed by Jackie Chan (1954), teaches him Chinese kung fu. Although he hides from the world that he is a master of this martial art, he starts training Dre for the upcoming tournament, in which he will fight strong opponents from his school. Various elements are used in the film to help us understand how American artists interpret Chinese reality. The aim of this paper is therefore to search in it and evaluate traces of orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to introduce several rare prints from the 17th and 18th centuries preserved in the collections of the Research Library in Olomouc that have connection to the history of China. These are a monumental richly illustrated encyclopedic work of Jean Baptiste Du Halde containing a description of the Chinese world, politics, culture, nature etc., a similar print of the Dutch traveler Johan Nieuhof, debut of the Dutch teacher and geographer Arnold Montana, also richly colored book called Flora Sinensis written by famous Polish Jesuit Michał Boym, which Athanasius Kircher used as a source for his work named China Illustrata, a book of Matthias Tanner containing biographies of Jesuit missionaries, including those who worked in China, and last but not least, well known Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes maps China‘s territory written by the founder of modern cartography Gerardus Mercator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analyzing contemporary Chinese religious life and religious policy of the Chinese state, the starting point should be to understand the context in which the term religion was introduced in China and to recognize the tools that the Chinese state has been using for handling religious expressions in society. These issues are rooted in the long history of the relationship between religion and the state in China; however, they are perceived through modern terminological and theoretical discourse. In fact, it is modern European science (humanities) that has defined the historical role, function, and form of religion since the late 19th century. With extensive help from the Chinese intellectual elite, the humanities have also interpreted various manifestations of religion in modern as well as in traditional Chinese society. Indeed, science, both domestic Chinese and Western, has played an important role in the introduction of the theoretical concept of religion into Chinese society and its subsequent use for specific political goals. This paper focuses on the origins of the concept of religion in the Chinese reality; it traces these origins in modern European thought and, in particular, the cultural and structural patterns that are unfamiliar to traditional (pre-modern) Chinese culture and society. It also attempts to outline problems that arise from the penetration and acculturation of the concept of religion into Chinese society and describes how these problems are reflected in the academic environment, especially in the Euro-American area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]