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The article titled "Sounds of Love and Sorrow" discusses the groundbreaking nature of the film by Hu Taili, which explores the making and playing of bamboo flutes among Taiwan's Indigenous Paiwan community. The film challenges the traditional representations of Indigenous music in ethnographic documentaries and the rise of new Indigenous talent in the Taiwanese music industry. It focuses on the emotional lives of the Paiwan elders and the cultural associations between flute music and their ancestral spirit. The film also opens up the possibility for cross-cultural comparisons and highlights the commonality between the Paiwan people and others who find pleasure in expressing sorrow and desire through music. [Extracted from the article]

This essay analyses two Singaporean graphic novels which represent the motivations and processes of creating and marketing cartoons, Sonny Liew's The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), a retrospective of the life and work of a fictional artist, and Troy Chin's ongoing autobiographical series, The Resident Tourist (begun in 2007). The analysis focuses on how Liew and Chin represent creative work and its relationship to Singaporean identity, focusing on how each negotiates one of the central contradictions of the creative industries in Singapore, the problem of how creativity can be conceptualised and practised within a society in which, for decades, pragmatism has been systematically valued and imagination devalued. There are three main ways in which both Liew and Chin construct, in very different ways, new creative worker and Singaporean identities which resonate with readers around the post-industrial world. The first is through subtle challenges to the Western, individualised ‘genius’ model of the creative worker. The second is through the creation of modes of address that encompass both Singaporean and non-Singaporean readers, and make all readers complicit in the project of constructing Singaporean identity. Third, both Liew and Chin reimagine the relationship between Singaporean and creative worker identities through simultaneously using and subverting the idea of national allegory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To analyze the different poetics of working-class and intellectual popular history, this paper compares two koa-a-hi ... (Taiwanese opera) performances which take Qing dynasty Taiwan as their setting, and are loosely based on the same folk legend. Kam Kokpo Goes to Taiwan (Kam Kokpo Koe Taioan ...) was performed at a temple festival in Taipei, in the bricolage o-pei-la ... style; India Coral Reblossoming (Chhiatang Hoe Khui ...) is an original "refined" opera performed at the National Theater. Kam Kokpo is a farce about class relations; India Coral is a tragedy about ethnic relations. Kam Kokpo constructs an allegorical relationship between the past and the present, in which characters stand for abstract essences. The combination of the "real" historical setting with the o-pei-la style makes the characters simultaneously social types and moral exemplars, allowing for a critical reading of both contemporary class relations and a traditional moral economy. In contrast, India Coral constructs a relationship between past and present that is analogical--the Pingpu aborigines were to the Han settlers as Taiwanese are to Americans. Despite the opera's explicit purpose of constructing a unique Taiwanese identity, its analogical poetics ironically replicate a distinctly American model of ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the gay and lesbian identity in Taiwanese opera. Feminist and lesbian activism in koa-a-hi; Overview of transgressive queerness of drag that lie primarily in the idea that cross gender performance; Understanding that gay and lesbian identities are modern and global; Features that characterize traditional Chinese local operas in general.

The article reviews the Web site Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, created by humanities scholar Henry Jenkins and available at www.henryjenkins.org.