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In their article, “10 Theses on Feminist Economics (or the antagonism between the strike and finance),” Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago are interested in a feminist economics that is able to redefine, based on the bodies and territories in conflict, labor and exploitation, communal and feminized modes of doing and resisting, and popular innovation in moments of crisis. They write from the position of having formed part of the organizing for the feminist strike that, since 2016, has driven what they characterize as a massive, radical, and transnational movement. They root the theses that they synthesize here in that dynamic of the strike, in order to elaborate an expanded and radical perspective on the “economy” as a critique of political economy and to continue weaving together conversations and exchanges. Starting from there, they trace its connection with the logics of exploitation and extraction that characterize capital valorization today.

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) as a renewal of the early exchanges that were disrupted during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

This paper is a response to Hillis Miller’s query on the author’s essay “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature.” The author basically agrees with Miller’s view on the shift from print culture to digital culture, explaining the special cultural context under which Chinese scholars emphasize the visual turn. Based on the rapid development of Chinese online literature, the author points out that print culture does not rival but coexists with digital culture. On the other hand, drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and insights of several leading figures of contemporary hermeneutics, the author contends that Miller’s dichotomy of poetics (form) and hermeneutics (content) is one-sided, since the two are compatible and integral, with concern for both content and form.

In her essay, “Making the Global Visible: Charting the Uneven Development of Global Monsters in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal,” Ju Young Jin examines the entanglement of the global and the monstrous in two recent films that position Korea on the cusp between Cold War politics and global capitalism: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja and Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal. The Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho and Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo offer viewers films that challenge conventional notions of monster by fusing it with a coming-of-age plot of the female protagonist that takes place on a global scale, which contests the bildungsroman form that valorizes the nation-state in tracing a person’s growth and social integration. By using the critical frameworks of postcolonial bildungsroman and Kaiju (Japanese monster films such as Godzilla) genre, I highlight how these films stage the broader tensions and radical discontinuities of globalization informed by the complex Korea-US relationship. My term “global monsters” is meant to refer, on one hand, to the discursive act of charting the uneven development and mobility of the monsters shown in the two films and, on the other hand, to the indexical act of making visible the process and force of globalization. Exploring the entanglement of the global and the monsters in the two films then is tantamount to delineating an abstract space of globalization and radical discontinuities therein writ large.

In this essay, I theorize an emergent urban power dynamic of infrastructural resource grabs or the use of state power to transfer infrastructural resources away from marginalized, racialized, and/or precariously documented populations. As a transfer, rather than a set of cuts or privatizations, I argue this dynamic is distinct from those of neoliberal or “shrinking” states and is a direct attack on the social reproduction capacity of communities and individuals. Focusing on the case of Detroit, where predominantly white suburban elites succeeded under the cover of Detroit’s 2013-14 bankruptcy proceedings to pry the possession of the water and sewage infrastructure away from the city proper, I demonstrate how primarily African-American residents of the city now subsidize the social reproduction of the predominantly white, wealthier Detroit suburbs and are subject to new conditions of failing or abrogated reproduction. In the second half of the essay, I position contemporary raced and classed infrastructural transfers in longer histories of elite control of the means of social reproduction. In the conclusion, I call for an anti-state, anti-capitalist social reproduction politics that could navigate this terrain defined less by biopolitical forms of welfare state discipline and more by warfare, designed failure, and the cruel denial of self-determination.

This paper examines the formation of modern historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism in terms of its interaction with and transformation of western theory. The discipline emerged during the eastward movement of Western ideas in the early twentieth century, promoting the “scientific study” of classical Chinese learning, and instituting curriculum and textbooks in Chinese universities. The reception of Western concepts of “literature” and “literary criticism” in the early twentieth century, largely through Japan, laid the very foundation of historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism as an independent subject of study. This paper argues that when adopting Western methods and cross-referencing Chinese and Western learning, the specificity of classical Chinese literary criticism should be the central issue of inquiry.

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.

This paper explores the notions of “Sinophone” and “Chinese-language cinema” under the rubrics of postcolonialism in Chinese film studies both in China and elsewhere around the world. The paper argues that these postcolonial-inspired notions misconstrue Chinese national identity building as imperialist/colonialist endeavours, and dichotomize Han and Chinese ethnic minorities. The paper offers its counterargument by examining cinematic practices of people’s cinema, minority nationality films and native-language films in the PRC.

The predominance of the horror genre, broadly conceived, in recent years attests to the profound sense of anxiety and dread permeating late capitalist societies. As the processes and effects of globalization become more viscerally experienced, they are also often rendered invisible or unknowable, and individuals and groups find themselves subject to an immense array of forces beyond their control. The contemporary scene is crowded with monsters, from alien invaders to the zombie apocalypse, set against the backdrop of darkly fantastic landscapes and dystopian visions. Drawing upon a variety of Marxist cultural theory, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the topographies of fear generated by this monstrous accumulation, and argues for a fantastic Marxist critique capable of addressing the existential dread and structural conditions for its possibility. Tally maintains that even the “real world” may be fruitfully analyzed and evaluated in terms of the fantastic, outlining a radical alterity that subtends the image of the real. He provides an innovative reading of the present cultural climate and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice in a moment in which, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The artist may be one of the last subject-positions within capitalism to determine their own labour under the sign of “creativity,” and to be held at an oblique angle to value productive labour; they are dialectically “free” to be creative (Adorno, Vishmidt, Stakemeir, Beech). But since 1973 if not 1915, artists mark this creative capacity as a process whereby reification has migrated from that of the object to that of the subject, to the artist-subject, now heightened in a post-industrial era of “feminized” and immaterial labour where service eclipses production. Artists in the “post medium condition” elaborate practices that track parallel to the service economy and yet continue to be mythologized as agents capable of delivering exceptional experience, an experience institutionally deemed to be specialized and singular. Artist Santiago Sierra mobilizes and elaborates delegated performance art with avowed and explicit reflexive cruelty to raise the contradiction inherent in the expectation of exceptional content delivered by free and creative agents to query the question of collective agency in instances where persons are expelled by the labour market in relation to state status. 33 Persons Paid to Have their Hair Dyed Blonde from 2001 dramatizes not only the global class war inherent in racialized stateless surplus populations in the context of collapsing social contracts set by the Keynesian state and operative from the 1930s to but the degree to which these populations come to be seen as less-than-human, as less than bearers of labor-power, but as disposable.

This special issue on “The Monstrous Global: The Effects of Globalization on Cultures” explores representations of the monstrous effects and products of globalization. The monstrous (as in The Monstrous Feminine by Barbara Creed) in this sense alludes to the ways in which local or national displays of fear and anxiety about the Other are embedded in struggles and tensions of global scale; the inability to cognitively map the effect of such global forces on local/national problems produces monstrous representations of the global. Global forces such as neoliberalism and reactionary nationalism, technology, climate change, migration and displacement lead to accelerating instability and proliferating problems without local solutions, thus leading to growing fear and anger in search of targets. The term “monstrous” also implies that the unruly and uncontainable forces of globalization can generate zones of undecidability that can precipitate formations of new identity and solidarity across race, class, and gender. This special issue is organized around monsters, both symbolic and literal, whose representation makes visible the changes, anxieties, and political responses generated by invisible global forces.

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that the films of Guillermo del Toro and Denis Villeneuve encourage viewers to reimagine the idea of monstrosity and its relationality to several spaces for the sake of the greater public good.

In her article “A Deconstructive Reading of Taoist Influenced Chinese and American Poetry” Hong Zeng attempts to deconstruct the logos status of "Nature" in Chinese natural philosophy and explore the tragic potentiality of such philosophy and poetry under its influence. It also analyzes its aesthetic strategies used to overcome historical tragedy, and how such tragic potentiality in classical Chinese philosophy and poetry break out into the imagery of death and fragmentation in modern Chinese and American poetry under its influence, including poetry by such poets as Hai Zi, Gu Cheng, Robert Bly and Wallace Stevens, and how it sometimes leads even to the tragic lives of the poets, such as the suicide of Gu Cheng and Hai Zi. In such exploration, the paper defines the rarely explored affinity between Chinese natural philosophy and western tragic theories and western aestheticism, and discloses the tragic propensity beneath the deep-rooted myth of the serene, holistic vision of Chinese natural philosophy and poetry under its influence.

This article will examine the corpus of poems written in the years 2004-2005, in response to the Israeli government’s Disengagement plan that unilaterally evacuated all Israeli communities from Gush Katif in the southern Gaza Strip. These poems are explored as a political speech act, whose purpose is to bring about an extra-linguistic outcome: to impact upon the feelings and thoughts of the addressees, as well as to influence them in relation to issues of identity and social affiliation. Indeed, these poems are part of a long and complex tradition of Hebrew political poetry, characterized not only by a response to political events but also by poets’ attempts to inspire change and shape attitudes—particularly regarding political issues that have moral implications. In this context of this tradition of political poetry, it could be assumed that the poetry written in response to the Disengagement plan would seek to participate in the extensive public protest and to bring about political change. I will argue, however, that this poetry was not political poetry, which sought to bring about an actual pragmatic change, but rather a type of political poetry that sought instead to confront and to process the implications of the anticipated political reality on an Israeli citizen’s identity and consciousness.

The article offers a Valentinian interpretation of the Hollywood film The Others (2001). A particular attention is paid to the ways in which cinematic motifs and narrative elements of the film draw on myths, ideas and symbolic imagery present in Valentinian works, especially in the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3) and the Gospel of Philip (NHC II, 3). In the course of the heuristic analysis, the paper argues that although the film employs Valentinian ideas, it depicts different understanding of the world. This issue is addressed in the last part of the article by situating the film within broader contexts that refer to the transformations of religion in the second half of the twentieth century in Western societies.

The interest of the younger generation in Indonesia to pursue the world of films began to show an increase. Universities responded to the high interest by opening study programs in the field of film. This positive condition expects to expand further and deepen knowledge in the field of film that can be generated by research in the field of film. Therefore we need a mapping of the distribution of film research topics in Indonesia. The purpose of this study is to examine trends in film research in Indonesia. The study underwent an analysis of several publications in indexing institutions. The method used is quantitative descriptive. The results obtained are research trends in the field of film in Indonesia, which have begun to increase quantitatively. However, research topics in the field of the film have not been able to fill the knowledge gap in the field of film, especially research related to the fields of Film Production, Film Distribution, Film Promotion, Film Technology, Film Viewers, Film Business, and Film Industry. Therefore, more research should be directed to these fields, because these fields are fields that graduated students from the film study program should master, to fill the job market in the field of film needed by users.

This art-based dissertation explored professionals' reactivity toward problematic-client interactions across the art therapy, expressive arts therapy, hairstyling, and tattooing disciplines. The concept was explored with a participant from each discipline in a four-phase sculpting process and through semi-structured interviews, response sculptures, and video footage and aggregates. Research questions examined (1) what happens to the participants' professional understanding of problematic clients and (2) self-understanding through engaging in a sculpting process focused on problematic clients, (3) similarities in participants' experiences across disciplines, and (4) what happens when the researcher creates and presents response art to the research participants. The two main outcomes were needs for transformation and supervision. The overarching transformation outcome encompassed the study's findings, which were the participants' (a) embodiment of sculptures to represent emotions and (b) negativity and discomfort in witnessing. Additionally, the participants identified the need for life adjustments, including (c) overcoming feelings of incompetence by (d) regaining control and empathy, as well as (e) improving self-regulation and (f) managing wellness.

'Mulan: An Exploration of Culture and Representation in Hollywood' is a presentation and detailed analysis of various representational, cultural, and minority-related issues in the context of Hollywood and western media. The presentation will focalize specifically around the recent live-action remake of the 1998 film "Mulan". The remake, premiered in March 2020, received critical backlash from various audiences (mostly from the BIPOC community), bashing the film for its misrepresentation of Ancient China and Ancient Chinese culture. Through this misrepresentation, the Hollywood film ultimately reflects views of cultural appropriation, misogyny, and overall minority underrepresentation in the United States. The research presents the backlash that lead actress Liu Yifei received over the course of the film's wave of criticism. Many uneducated and uninformed viewers raced to Twitter to attack her performance and 'cooperation' with this controversial film, however it is important to consider the relationship between Chinese Americans and the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), as it is incredibly risky to speak out against the CCP due to the possibility of being blacklisted by the Chinese market. Overall, the presentation encompasses and analyzes the issues stirred by Mulan 2020, the response of the BIPOC community, and how the controversy is ultimately a representation of Hollywood media when dealing with portrayal of foreign cultures.

Hear Me Roar, a compilation of personal essays interspersed with short forms, grapples with the nuances of compliance versus autonomy in the context of the male gaze, beauty standards, and pop culture. The collection also explores what it means to treasure something—another person, an object—and how to express and deepen that affection.

Inclusive media arts education should be accessible for all young people so that they can be successful citizens of this media-rich, media-saturated world. Issues surrounding access and exclusion are complex. What barriers contribute to exclusion within media arts education programs? The purpose of this study is to determine how best to create more inclusion in media arts education through leadership practices. More specifically, how do we become more inclusive in filmmaking practice, and what is the role of leadership in that endeavor? This study strives to determine how leadership best serves a highly successful inclusive media arts organization, and to make recommendations based on the findings with the aim of transferability to other media arts education programs. Through the paradigm of pragmatism, grounded theory qualitative research occurred at Bus Stop Films, an accessible film studies program that makes inclusive films located in Sydney, Australia. Interviews, a focus group, and observations were used during data collection. Research participants included administrators, teachers, staff, and students. Themes were drawn from the data using open, selective, and axial coding. Participants defined what success means to them, which traits and qualities are necessary to leadership in that environment, and what inclusive media arts means to them. The primary research question is as follows: How does leadership impact the success of inclusive media arts programs? Four major themes emerged from the data: inclusive leadership, dimensions of filmmaking culture, inclusive filmmaking practice, and purpose. The findings of this study led to the development of The Theory of Dispositions in Filmmaking, which posits that disposition serves as an active catalyst within leadership practices and filmmaking practices in media arts education programs.

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital video surveillance cameras in the twenty-first century. All of these carry legacies of intense racial coding, ones which Native scholars and visual artists have critiqued with counter discourse and works of “visual sovereignty.” Intervening into film studies, Native American studies, and critical theories of visual culture, the research offers new insights into the complex relationship between settler colonialism and visual sovereignty. I use visual sovereignty as a framework to confront the often-absurd assumptions that circulate around visual representations of Native Americans, while also disempowering structures of cinematic dominance and stereotype.

Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing has been reproduced multiple times in a contemporary context. This thesis focuses on two key productions, BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told televised adaptation and Joss Whedon’s 2013 film and examines how these productions translate the gender themes in the play to a contemporary setting. To study translations of gender, this thesis is focused on the adaptations of Beatrice and Hero, two major female characters of the play. The comparison of these adaptations is accomplished through analyzing the pieces and reviewing existing work. While there are some important differences between the adaptations, the major problems Beatrice and Hero are limited by as women are problems that can be successfully transferred to the contemporary setting. Conclusively, these adaptations choose to demonstrate that women facing limitations in their own microcultures have the agency to accept these limitations or try to do something about them.

Border-crossings —both geographical and metaphorical— are a fertile territory for critical and fictional discourses that explore the forging of gendered personal, social, and cultural identities. The notion of the border becomes a political, material, discursive or symbolic limit, a space of conflict, resistance and negotiation, where power relations are articulated. In this dissertation I analyze the following border-crossing narratives and films: The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; Jo també soc catalana and El último patriarca, by Najat El Hatchmi; Retorno a Hansala, by Chus Gutiérrez, and Sin dejar huella, by María Novaro. My study has a transnational approach, since it includes both Iberian and Latin American works that portray women living in vulnerable, liminal spaces, and crossing geographical, metaphorical, and cultural borders. I address the concept of the border as a methodological tool to compare the experiences of women from different generations and geographical contexts in order to analyze diverse social practices and ideologies that create exclusionary demarcations. The women portrayed in these works challenge hegemonic constructions about fixed identities and unmovable bodies and, by extension, they represent other marginal subjects as they uncover asymmetrical power relations, emphasizing the existence of other voices claiming new agencies as subjects of knowledge, pointing to the need for a reflection on the socio-cultural hierarchies that define and delineate the forms of knowledge production. I draw from Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border thinking” and feminist critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Chandra Mohanty to engage in an intercultural and intertextual dialogue with these works, emphasizing the role of gender in the construction of cultural and symbolic borders and the ability of women to create real and metaphorical borderlands to contest dominant gender ideologies. The texts studied here emphasize the discourse of resistance a

Cuban documentaries, which have experienced dramatic changes in the last two decades, are now more in tune with the most recent global trends in cinema. However, the scarce implementation within the documentary genre of other perspectives and modes of analysis, outside those that are purely cinematographic, has stalled investigations in the field, thus creating a disengagement with the structural and thematic renovation that has been taking place within the discourse of contemporary Cuban documentaries. My dissertation “Intermedialidad en el documental cubano contemporáneo” examines a select sample of representative texts and Cuban documentaries, with a view to adapting and/or developing an effective theoretical framework for the study of the documentary genre within the Cuban context. It also incorporates parameters of study that can assimilate the historical social context, and the dialogue with other artistic and cultural disciplines within the documentary, while integrating the analysis of some contemporary Cuban documentary works in order to offer an explanation about the processes that take place in the different phases of documentary realization. My research advances our understanding of the new dynamics operating within the realm of contemporary Cuban documentary realization from the perspective of intermedial studies. By examining the use of intermediality in Cuban documentaries, this dissertation brings into the spotlight not only the complex interactions of multiple media in the Cuban contemporary documentary scene, but also the way in which intermediality addresses fundamental issues related to culture and politics, by bringing into play the ideological tensions and problems generated by Cuba’s unique political regime. In addition, by exploring and describing the possibilities offered by the distinctive characteristics of intermediality in Cuban works, this study positions Cuban documentaries within broader academic dialogs on intermediality, while contr