bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Provisioning and Marketing
Authors: Bates Lynsey A.
Published: May 2017

Examining the variability of enslaved life across the Atlantic World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is increasingly possible with the availability of comparable data. This chapter explores the networks that slaves developed between the fields of the plantation and spaces beyond its borders. Analyzing data from two Jamaican sugar estates, a quantitative approach elucidates the conditions that facilitated enslaved people’s cultivation of surplus in provisioning areas and their access to markets that fostered the island’s internal market economy. GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analysis of cartographic data and modern soil quality data suggests the relative quality of conditions for cultivation. Assemblages recovered from slave villages on the two estates provide a sample of goods that enslaved people acquired in local markets. The results suggest that enslaved people with access to a larger amount of provision grounds with favorable conditions had greater access to the markets. More broadly, the evidence demonstrates the connections that enslaved people established to turn an exploitative system to their advantage.
Life beyond the Village
Authors: Delle James A.
Published: May 2017

Much of what we know archaeologically about the material realities of Caribbean plantation slavery is based on the interpretation of objects recovered from plantation village contexts. While a majority of those enslaved on plantations did in fact live in such contexts, not all did. This chapter analyzes a previously unexamined material and spatial reality of Jamaican plantations, the existence and importance of extra-village localities in which people lived. Defined here as field houses, these structures were dispersed across the plantation landscape, located within agricultural fields and provision grounds. The material considered comes from an early nineteenth century plantation known as Marshalls Pen; excavations conducted on three field houses provide the data from which this interpretation is derived.
Exposed
Authors: Alaimo Stacy
Published: May 2017

Exposed argues for a material feminist posthumanism that departs from the predominant modes of humanist transcendence in theory, science, consumerism, and popular culture. Featuring three sections, the book calls for an environmental stance in which humanity thinks, feels, and acts as the very stuff of the world. As a work within the environmental humanities, it grapples with climate change, biodiversity, sustainability, ocean conservation, environmental activism, and the depiction of the anthropocene. And as a study in new materialism it focuses on how the materiality of human bodies provoke modes of posthumanist pleasure, environmental protest, and a sense of immersion within the strange agencies that constitute the world.
Dwelling in the Dissolve
Authors: Alaimo Stacy
Published: May 2017

The introduction of Exposed briefly lays out the methodology, theories, arguments, and central questions of the book. It argues that a material sense of exposure and pleasure fosters ontologies, epistemologies, ethics, and politics that interconnect the human with the nonhuman, the inhuman and the more than human. As a cultural studies project, Exposed takes activist and other “low” practices seriously, as potent modes of political contestation.
The Unfinished Business of Modernism
Authors: Richmond Scott C.
Published: May 2017

The first chapter uses Marcel Duchamp’s only surviving film, Anémic Cinéma, to show how proprioceptive aesthetics is a crucial alternative to the modernist aesthetics that orients most of film and media theory, emphasizing their decisively different structures of reflexivity. Anémic Cinéma creates an illusory depth in the coupling between the cinema and its viewers’ bodies: it configures the cinema as an optical device, or a machine for the modulation of its viewers’ perception. In place of representation, it engenders voluptuous illusion. It becomes a schematic diagram for an alternative to modernism, for proprioceptive aesthetics.
Restorative Justice Is Not Enough
Authors: Meiners Erica R.
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter engages with and reframes a body of scholarship and organizes its focuses on the STPP. This is to both explore the punishing artifacts that prison or carceral reforms produce, and argue that a turn toward abolition politics provides a needed frame for those working against the criminalization of youth, especially in schools.
Not This
Authors: Meiners Erica R.
Published: May 2017

The seventh and final chapter of For the Children analyzes the challenges and possibilities of small-scale initiatives that struggles to build other forms of public safety beyond prisons and policing. Working with the state is not completely off the table for several reasons, as the state is not inherently good, neutral, or bad. Antiprison organizers have pushed back on the carceral state, but the strategies invoked indicate that society has not fully abandoned all facets or forms of democratic governance.
Logistics
Authors: LeCavalier Jesse
Published: May 2017

The first chapter traces the emergence of contemporary business logistics out of its roots in both military and managerial contexts. More than simply managing supply chains, contemporary logistics operates between abstract and concrete realms to manage objects in space and time with architectural, infrastructural, and territorial consequences.
Predator Empire
Authors: Shaw Ian G. R.
Published: May 2017

This book explores the rise of the Predator Empire, the name for the contemporary “dronified” U.S. national security state. Moving from the Vietnam War to the “war on terror,” it investigates how changes in military strategy, domestic policing, and state surveillance have come together to enclose the planet in a robotic system of control. It argues that we are witnessing a transition from a labor-intensive “American empire” to a machine-intensive Predator Empire. Following philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Peter Sloterdijk, the book argues that the nonhuman environment directly influences who we are, and therefore goes beyond considering drone warfare as a purely military concern. The rise of drones present a series of “existential crises” that are reengineering the spaces of violence, domestic policing, and even the character of modern states.
The Long March to Human Enclosure
Authors: Shaw Ian G. R.
Published: May 2017

The first chapter builds on the Introduction to explain the idea of “technological civilization,” and puts forward the idea of a “more-than-human geopolitics.” It then investigates the passage from an American Empire to a Predator Empire before looking in more detail at the power of machines to discipline and police the human condition.
The Rule by Nobody
Authors: Shaw Ian G. R.
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter uses Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “rule by Nobody.” It is the idea of a bureaucratic system in which people no longer have accountability. The chapter uses this to explain modern U.S. surveillance and other “machinic” forms of social control. It explores the idea of social alienation and disaffection in more depth.
Policing Everything
Authors: Shaw Ian G. R.
Published: May 2017

The fifth chapter explores the militarization of U.S. policing and connects it to the wider idea of “enclosure” and policing civilization. It also looks at technological forms of policing. The chapter finishes by looking at the “dronification” of the urban atmosphere and future drones that can “swarm” in the atmosphere.
What Is Airport Urbanism?
Authors: Hirsh Max
Published: May 2017

An autobiographical introduction that provides a unique frame for studying the cross-border movement of the “semi-privileged” air travelers in Asia. The chapter argues that these passengers, and the infrastructure systems that they use, have been omitted from urban scholarship due to the methodological and conceptual limitations of the existing literature. Through an analysis of three key theoretical concerns—mobility, infrastructure, and the everyday—it outlines an alternative, humanities-based methodology based on mapping, interviews, and site analysis that is more applicable to studying urban development in a contemporary Asian context.
Transborder Infrastructure
Authors: Hirsh Max
Published: May 2017

The second chapter investigates the “upstream” check-in system that allows passengers in Mainland China to fly through Hong Kong's airport without going through customs and immigration procedures. These facilities serve travelers whose cross-border movement is limited by their income or citizenship, such as tourists or traders from Africa and the Middle East. At the upstream terminal in China, travelers print their boarding pass and proceed through emigration. A sealed ferry then takes them across the border to Hong Kong, where they are transferred to an underground train that takes them to their departure gate. Isolated from other passenger flows, these “upstream” travelers technically never enter Hong Kong. Mapping the movement of passengers between Mainland China and the airport, this chapter documents the insertion of aviation infrastructure into marginal neighborhoods and unspectacular structures. It analyzes the aesthetics of transborder infrastructure in order to interpret broader discrepancies in global migration regimes in the political and economic framework of the Pearl River Delta.
Cheap Tickets
Authors: Hirsh Max
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter traces the development of budget air travel in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. It researches the development of low-tech interventions, e.g. airline ticketing counters located inside convenience stores and no-frills terminals built on the periphery of major hubs. This chapter looks to document how these facilities cater to travelers who lack the basic infrastructure needed to fly, such as a credit card, internet access, or even a last name. It examines two particular airports in Thailand's Bangkok and Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur, as they preform a “trickle down” process where cargo hangars and older terminals that were slated for demolition have instead been redeveloped into centers of low-cost aviation. Through a study of the future budget terminals in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, it contrasts the populist narratives adopted by budget airlines with the reluctance of planners to adapt airports to the needs of low-cost travelers.
Beautiful Remnants, Brutal Remains
Authors: Blevins Steven
Published: May 2017

The first chapter analyzes David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghost in relation to the way in which recent scholars of the African Atlantic have wrestled with the perennial problem of the “example” as a representational form, in which particular acts of violent atrocity must stand in for extended, systematic, and non-singular event(s) of modernity.
Blood Pressures
Authors: Blevins Steven
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter explores the bio-medicalized forms of human bio-cargo to find expression in the sign of “blood” as the particularized biological “matter” of family history, now articulated in enthusiasm for DNA mapping as a way to restore family genealogies lost in the Middle Passage. The chapter looks to creative works by Bernardine Evaristo, Dorothea Smartt, and Inge Blackman, and Isaac Julien, which provide compelling anti-genealogies of intimacy and belonging irreducible to the brute substance of bio-matter.
Bespoke History
Authors: Blevins Steven
Published: May 2017

The fifth chapter begins with a consideration of bespoke tailor, menswear designer, and global fashion icon Ozwald Boateng in order to simultaneously think about the historicity of fashion and the commodified “branding” of the past. The chapter contrasts Boateng’s carefully cultivated public persona with another fashionable icon, Yinka Shonibare MBE, an artist best known for refashioning aristocratic dress of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century in African batik.
Reading the Past and Listening to the Present
Authors: Sojoyner Damien M.
Published: May 2017

The conclusion of First Strike debunks the claim that teacher unions prevent administrators from excising bad teachers from schools, which in turn creates underperforming students. Through a meditation on his mother’s experience as a schoolteacher, Sojoyner suggests that the exclusionary potential and pedagogical insufficiency of standardized testing, as well as the cutting of social support nets for students, are the actual contributing factors. The author describes his influences in W. E. B. DuBois and Clyde Woods, and summarizes his individual chapters’ claims.
It’s Turned into a Race Thing
Authors: Kinney Rebecca J.
Published: May 2017

The first chapter examines a twenty-first century location of a public narrative, an Internet discussion board, in order to analyze the narrative of Detroit’s nostalgic past. The past is frequently remembered as not about race, even when there is the benefit of decades of research that shows the relationship between race and place in America. In one particular Internet forum, “I found my old house in Detroit today”, provides a place to study the narrative of a white exodus that is deeply apart of the city’s decline. It reveals the signification of the past as a way to illuminate the continuing significance of race in the twenty-first century.
Fanning the Embers
Authors: Kinney Rebecca J.
Published: May 2017

The third chapter examines the story of Detroit’s rebirth through both a reliance on its storied past and the possibilities of the future through an examination of a wildly successful commercial starring Eminem. It provides the connective tissue between the storied past of Detroitas as a location of workers and the contemporary narrative of a city on the rise. At its center is the mythic tale provided by the 2011 Chrysler “Born of Fire” commercial. The narrative tale of a rebirth of a city, and by extension the American auto industry, in the face of epic decline makes the story of Detroit the ultimate comeback tale—a phoenix rising from the ashes of destruction.
Feeding Detroit’s Rise
Authors: Kinney Rebecca J.
Published: May 2017

In the fifth chapter, the book examines the story of Detroit on the rise—the ultimate conclusion of most of the disparate narratives surrounding the city. The fascination with Detroit in the twenty-first century is due not to its ruin but to the evidence of Detroit as possible. This chapter looks explicitly at the narrative of the rise of a “new Detroit.” This rise is best seen in media portrayals of as the city’s “hungry” creative class, the billion-dollar investment of Dan Gilbert, and the media frenzy around the opening of a Whole Foods Market in Detroit and the company’s use of that store as a national platform against “racism and elitism.”
The Anarchist Roots of Geography
Authors: Springer Simon
Published: May 2017

The Anarchist Roots of Geography: Toward Spatial Emancipation sets the stage for the radical politics of possibility and freedom through a discussion of the insurrectionary geographies that suffuse our daily experiences. This book is the first major study of the concept of anarchist geographies. It realigns radical geography away from Marxism and back to its original trajectory of anarchism. It ultimately encourages a relational understanding of space, wherein anarchism is recognized as a holistic and everyday form of emancipationfrom statistic, capitalistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and imperialistic ideas.
Emancipatory Space
Authors: Springer Simon
Published: May 2017

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, the fourth chapter proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Emancipation here means a perpetual contestation of the alienating effects of capitalism and its contemporary expression as neoliberalism. The chapter establishes a framework for understanding democracy in nonviolent and anarchist terms by arguing for radical democracy through agonistic public places. Public places are of primary importance because democracy is meant to be inclusive to all. They are places where the politics of hierarchy, technocracy, international patrons, government appropriation, and co-optation by the modern aristocracy can be dismantled by a continuous dialogue of reformation.
The Double Vision of Empire
Authors: Lisle Debbie
Published: May 2017

Thomas Cook & Sons’ domination of the tourism industry in 19th Century Egypt enabled them to facilitate the British military’s efforts to rescue General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884-85. This event reveals much about the tourist sensibility that shaped occupying soldiers as they engaged with local populations at the far reaches of Empire, and demonstrates the clear alignment between militarism and tourism within the Imperial mind-set.
Connecting Tourism and Terrorism
Authors: Lisle Debbie
Published: May 2017

As new media technologies give occupying soldiers more scope to record their overseas adventures and disseminate them through the internet, modes of militarized global encounter have re-ordered familiar understandings of distance and difference. One consequence of the normalization of war after 9/11 has been a securitization of the tourism industry, bringing the serious questions of global violence more directly into leisured spaces like hotels, airports and tourist attractions.
Touring Otherwise
Authors: Lisle Debbie
Published: May 2017

Are there ways in which the combined modes of dominance reproduced by war-tourism entanglements can be disrupted, reoriented and resisted? Aesthetic interventions can prompt us to look differently at war and tourism, and mobilize us to think and act creatively to resist how these twinned practices are currently bolstering Neoliberal dominance.
Foucault in Iran
Authors: Ghamari-Tabrizi Behrooz
Published: May 2017

The book advances a novel reading of Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution and further shows how his encounter with the revolution informs his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and enlightenment. Foucault saw in the revolution, particularly in its religious expression, an instance of his anti-teleological philosophy, a revolution that did not simply fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian revolution was its ambiguity, precisely the same feature for which his critics ridiculed him. Rather than his fascination with death or his absorption in the aesthetics of violence, as his critics assert, it was the inexplicability of “the man in revolt” that motivated much of his writing on the Iranian revolution. He defined the indeterminacy of the revolutionary movement together with the inexplicability of the revolutionary subject as an expression of political spirituality. This concept led many of his detractors to accuse the anti-humanist philosopher of defending theocracy in order to advance his critique of modern governmentality and its disciplinary technologies.
Foucault’s Indictment
Authors: Ghamari-Tabrizi Behrooz
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses how September 11 attacks generated a major transformation in the political discourse of modernity. Its discusses how significant number of political philosophers of the Right and the Left joined together and castigated Foucault and other critics of the Enlightenment rationality for their failure to defend what they dub “Western values.”
The Reign of Terror, Women’s Issues, and Feminist Politics
Authors: Ghamari-Tabrizi Behrooz
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the perils of a universalist approach to the revolutionary movement by examining the postrevolutionary gender politics. It offers a detailed narrative of the controversy over the imposition of hejāb in 1979 and Western feminists’ failed attempt to shape the local politics of Iranian women activists.
Cult Programming
Authors: Selisker Scott
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter turns to links between religious and political extremism. First, it examines how WWII-era science was used to describe cults in the 1970s, starting with Ted Patrick and Patty Hearst. It then describes how cults function in popular and literary fiction.
Diagnosing the Genuine “Jewish Type”
Authors: Reuter Shelley Z.
Published: May 2017

The first chapter looks at the initial construction of Tay-Sachs as a Jewish disease in the context of anti-immigrationism in the early decades of the 1900s to demonstrate how medical racialism both contributed to the passing of restrictive immigration legislation in the US and helped lay the groundwork for genetic responsibilization later on.
The Unethics of Looking at Disease–Disability
Authors: Reuter Shelley Z.
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter examines the lay discourse of Tay-Sachs, specifically the way in which online video representations of children with the disease have served to constitute the disease and the Other of Tay-Sachs more recently, namely as a tragic disease-disability that can be avoided with a simple genetic test. The ethics of posting such videos is explored during this chapter.
Freedom, Exclusion, and Genetic Decision Making
Authors: Reuter Shelley Z.
Published: May 2017

The conclusion of Testing Fate ties together the themes of the book and extends the argument of Chapter 5 by making the point that the “unfreedom” to fulfill one’s genetic responsibilities derives not only from the phenomenon of geneticization, but also from the paradox of ascribing agency to the Other. Biocitizenship is as much about responsibilization and the individual’s right to be unfree as it is about belonging; so long as some individuals’ freedoms are constrained by their cultural exclusion as the Other, or even where the freedom of some is contingent upon that exclusion, unconstrained agency, i.e., truly free choice, genetic decision-making is impossible.
Compassionate Citizenship
Authors: Arif Yasmeen
Published: May 2017

The second chapter explores the making of a ‘justice movement’ called Nyayagrah in the context of an episode of Hindu--Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. The unleashing of unprecedented violence across the state against Muslims is a well- documented occasion of “communal” violence in recent times in India. However, the afterlife that the authors visits here is the making of a justice movement that is currently gaining subterranean ground in the state but has not seen any academic reflection. Following Gandhian principles drawn from the anti-colonial movement, Satyagraha, but reincarnated in current India, Nyayagrah insists on claiming democratic citizenship through the process of legal redress.
Emotional Geographies
Authors: Arif Yasmeen
Published: May 2017

The fourth chapter explores a span of civil violence in Beirut, Lebanon where the emphasis is about recognizing physical space as an immutable condition of violence and its afterlife - a condition that prolongs the emplacement of embodied experiences of violence in the social texts of suffering. For a city/nation that was organized around strictly defined neighborhoods of confessional communities, the onslaught of continuing violence inscribed itself onto these neighborhoods and marked them into territorially bounded places, literally transforming the ideal of a multicultural urban space into a patchwork city of confessional emplacements, which often led to extreme hostilities. The infusion of faith- based identity and experience in the density of a city scarred by violence, the afterlife here considers emotions of lost urban ideals and anxieties of destabilized cosmopolitanisms that are made acute by the memories and anticipations of devastating hostility.
The Urban Apparatus
Authors: Martin Reinhold
Published: May 2017

The Urban Apparatus analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. Its main argument is that understanding the city as infrastructure (i.e. hardware in all senses) reveals the category of the urban, and of urbanization, to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly-bound neoliberal regime, rather than an empirical or properly theoretical description of that regime. The “urban” is, in short, an apparatus of power and of knowledge. The book’s detailed theoretical introduction elaborates this thesis. It is followed by ten shorter essays, each of which explores questions related to urban life through specific examples from around the world.
The Urban Apparatus
Authors: Martin Reinhold
Published: May 2017

The Introduction proposes its examinations and theories on the “urban apparatus,” “mediapolitics” scale, infrastructure, and the essay form. In all sense a city is hardware. It is not, in the first instance, a space, a place, a territory, or a zone; nor is it, strictly speaking, a social body. For by identifying a city with hardware, it enables the recognition of it as a site of sociotechnical life and production where power is encoded, memories are stored, and possible features are recorded.
Public and Common(s)
Authors: Martin Reinhold
Published: May 2017

The fourth essay examines the interacting categories of “public” and “commons” as elements of counter-hegemonic political discourse built on the ruins of socialism.
Boycotting Israel as Native Nationalism
Authors: Salaita Steven
Published: May 2017

The second chapter offers a broad history of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement and theorizes ways that it can be used in the service of Native nationalism. It explores the implications of academic boycott in the context of broader questions about decolonization, emphasizing the geographies of Indigeneity in America. While issues of academic freedom and activist strategy are central to BDS, it is important to keep sight of the movement’s engagement with the landscapes from which it arises. What does it mean for a BDS movement, one originating in Palestine, to do work in America, itself a colonized space? In what ways can and should BDS interact with Native communities? How do Native communities inform the tactics and philosophies of BDS? The chapter argues that BDS actually functions as an articulation of Native sovereignty, inside and beyond America, but only when it transcends its own nationalist paradigms.
Ethnic Cleansing as National Uplift
Authors: Salaita Steven
Published: May 2017

The third chapter compares the colonial narratives of Andrew Jackson and Ze’ev Jabotinsky to illustrate how foundational discourses of settlement traverse time and geography. Both played central roles in horrible acts of ethnic cleansing, Jackson in the Trail of Tears and Jabotinsky in the 1948 nakba (catastrophe), when more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes. They reify the logic of settler colonization and theorize the necessity of violence in the development of a sustainable modernity. In this way, they helped design a strategy that would be used by numerous imperialists in the following decades.
Shortcomings of global multilateral agrifood trade and a new food-dependency-based protagonism
Authors: Barbosa Junior Ricardo Cesar , Pfrimer Matheus Hoffmann
Published: May 2017

In this paper, we explore the relationship between agriculture and trade liberalisation, by discussing the dissident posture of High-income Food-dependent Countries (HIFDC) in the post 2008 food crises scenario. Indicating how these changes have led to the emergence of a new food-dependency-based protagonism where security has primacy over trade.
China e África além da economia: qual o impacto do FOCAC na arena multilateral (1971-2014)?
Authors: Montenegro Renan Holanda , Silva Alves João Ricardo Cumarú
Published: May 2017

Este trabalho avalia se houve aumento da afinidade sino-africana após a criação do FOCAC. Para tanto, utilizamos dados de votações da Assembleia Geral da ONU para comparar o nível de afinidade das díades envolvendo China e os integrantes do Fórum antes e depois de sua criação, em 2000.
Tracing China
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: May 2017

Tracing China’s journey began from exploring rural revolution and reconstitutions of community in South China. Spanning decades of rural-urban divide, it finally uncovers China’s global reach and Hong Kong’s cross-border dynamics. Helen Siu traverses physical and cultural landscapes to examine political tumults transforming into everyday lives, and fathom the depths of human drama amid China’s frenetic momentum toward modernity. Highlighting complicity, Siu portrays how villagers, urbanites, cadres, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals—laden with historical baggage—venture forward. But have they victimized themselves in the process?
This essay collection, informed by critical social theories and shaped by careful scrutiny of fieldwork and archival texts, is woven by key historical/anthropological themes—culture, history, power, place-making, and identity formation. Siu stresses process and contingency and argues that culture and society are constructed through human actions with nuanced meanings, moral imagination, and contested interests. Challenging the notion that social/political changes are mere linear historical progressions, she traces layers of the past in present realities.
Cultural Identity and the Politics of Difference in South China
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: May 2017

The term “China” presents many faces and meanings. The wealth of differentiating experiences beneath the surface of an enduring, naturalizing uniformity encompassed by the term has intrigued scholars, prompting them to call for analytical tools that illuminate the paradox at various historical junctures. A basic assumption is required, which forms the basis of this paper: “Chineseness” is not an immutable set of beliefs and practices but a process that captures a wide range of emotions and states of being. It is a civilization, a place, a polity, a history, and a people who acquire identities through association with these characteristics. I will highlight crucial moments in the construction of cultural identities in a region loosely termed South China (Huanan), where different meanings of being Chinese are selectively pursued. Instead of presenting reified, objectively identifiable traits and boundaries imposed on a population, I stress their fluid and negotiated qualities as perceived by those asserting them. However circumstantial the contestations, and however duplicitous these identities may have seemed, their emergence is also rooted in particular social, political, and economic relationships.
China’s Century
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: May 2017

This essay reviews the following books: Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999, by Yan Yunxiang, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy, by Vanessa Fong, and On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka.
Where Were the Women?
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: May 2017

I suggest that the marriage strategies have been sustained and at the same time changed by different groups in various economic and political circumstances through the centuries: the “literati” lineages in their acts of territorial expansion and cultural exclusion in the late imperial period, those women labor workers who used their economic independence in the turn of the century to resist marriage, and contemporary residents of Xiaolan who aspire to join the urban working class and who eagerly distance themselves from peasant neighbors. Each of these territorially based groups has given the local marriage custom a self-interested reading. Together, they have perpetuated the cultural assumptions and the historical legacies of an emerging larger polity to which they have attached themselves.
The Cultural Landscape of Luxury Housing in South China
Authors: Siu Helen F.
Published: May 2017

This chapter attempts to use the “fever” for luxury housing in post-Mao Guangdong to highlight a historically specific circulation of cultural meanings in the making of a regional landscape. Many regions of China experienced a building boom in the 1990s. Overseas Chinese capital, particularly that from Hong Kong developers, has partially shaped the skyline of coastal metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai—luxury housing estates, shopping malls, five-star hotels, golf courses, and clubs. Private housing markets in these cities have grown with remarkable speed and intensity, and a large portion of this growth is fueled by government danwei providing units for employees to purchase at subsidized prices. Where private developers enter the market to offer affordable choices, families have explored the “one family two systems” strategy in housing as they have in jobs. One member may explore entrepreneurial ventures while another holds onto state sector allocations for basic security. In pursing their own intimate spaces in a more mobile housing situation that allows residents to straddle state and market, are they redefining social hierarchies that have previously been shaped by bureaucratic agenda and political privilege? Have their notions of place-based identities and loyalties changed by the new housing choices?
Hong Kong’s Twentieth Century
Authors: Gungwu Wang
Published: May 2017

Viewing Hong Kong from the perspective of its global setting is an exceptionally fruitful exercise. Hong Kong is one of the few places in world history that came into being on the edge of an irresistible globalization process that is still continuing. It is a story of growth and change shaped by a modern empire. The British Empire, at its height for most of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, was the most physically global entity in the world. This volume recognizes that, while taking the long view to bring the story beyond the era of empires down to the present when dramatic changes are taking place in Asia, especially in China. It is a good moment to look back and outline some of the ways that Hong Kong has responded to those changes....
Prologue Cold War Hong Kong
Authors: Roberts Priscilla
Published: May 2017

For Hong Kong, the Cold War was a distinct and crucial period in its own evolution and in its relations with China and the rest of the world. Without the global clash of ideologies, the city might well have failed to win and keep the key nodal position it attained in those years. Economically, intellectually, socially, and culturally, the Cold War years were crucial in ensuring that Hong Kong became a unique and cosmopolitan metropolis. Hong Kong, whatever its limitations—and it could at times be parochial, inward looking, and self-obsessed—was set on the path to become one of the world’s greatest and most vibrant cities, a city that would play a key role in the modernization of Greater China, especially the mainland, even as it developed a sense of specifically Hong Kong identity. From its outset, Hong Kong has been unique. During the Cold War and in many ways thanks to the demands, challenges, and opportunities arising from that conflict, already established social, economic, political, and administrative patterns of behavior within Hong Kong were intensified and adapted, transforming the territory. Run initially by British officials but increasingly by local Hong Kong recruits to the civil service, a hub not just for economic networks of capital and governmental exchanges of every variety but also for transnational intellectual, political, and social interchanges at every level, Hong Kong was one of a kind, its essence almost undefinable. Hong Kong developed its own voice, one that, perhaps muted in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 handover and the Asian economic crisis, is once more becoming ever more discernible. Its greatest contribution to China’s modernization may yet lie in the future....
Cold War Hong Kong
Authors: Roberts Priscilla
Published: May 2017

In Hong Kong the rules of the global Cold War were often suspended. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that the territory epitomized to the ultimate degree many of the ambiguities and contradictions of the Cold War, a confrontation that, however fierce its rhetoric, was usually characterized by pragmatic caution, at least where the major powers were concerned. The story of Hong Kong during the Cold War reinforces a growing body of scholarship on the period that suggests that, while situating the history of post-1945 Asia in “a globalized Cold War context,” one must also remember that Asia “had its own internal dynamics and trajectories, and it evolved in ways that were not entirely the making of the big powers.”
The American Cold War in Hong Kong, 1949–1960
Authors: Xun Lu
Published: May 2017

During the early Cold War years, the United States came to regard the British colony of Hong Kong as an outpost of its own in terms of relations with the People’s Republic of China. Sharing a border with New China, Hong Kong became an arena for both the Cold War between East and West and the conflict between Communist and Nationalist Chinese. By its very existence, it served as an intelligence and propaganda vector for the US Far Eastern containment policy, sometimes at considerable cost to Hong Kong itself. The existing scholarly literature on US policies toward Hong Kong during the 1950s largely focuses upon top-level Anglo-American negotiations, with little consideration of the role of Hong Kong per se as a regional pivot in making and waging the Cold War. This chapter examines those factors that enabled the colony to succeed in surviving the ideological confrontation, while arguing that over time the significance of Hong Kong to American Cold War strategy steadily increased. It scrutinizes in detail US propaganda institutions and programs in Hong Kong that appreciably influenced the overseas Chinese in East and Southeast Asia.
Identities and roles
Authors: Hooper Beverley
Published: May 2017

As representatives of the West in China, to use Isabel Crook’s words, the long-term residents were active participants in the PRC’s ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ (or ‘friendship diplomacy’) which, like its Soviet counterpart, was directed towards influencing foreign public opinion, especially in the West. In her book A History of China’s Foreign Propaganda 1949–1966, PRC journalist and author Xi Shaoying saw the long-term residents, along with short-term invited ‘friends of China’, as playing an integral role in the government’s ‘foreign propaganda work’. In the West, the long-termers’ most contentious activity was their support for the PRC against their own governments.
‘The world within’
Authors: Hooper Beverley
Published: May 2017

To many other Western residents, the lives of embassy staff and their families seemed a world away from their own. Outside was Maoist Peking, its blue and grey cotton clothed inhabitants battling to get on crowded buses or cycling past the city’s low grey buildings and billboards urging them to ‘build socialism faster, better and more economically’. The world within was light and bright, a reproduction of a modern Western apartment with all its trappings—and in the evening the scene of many a party as people ate, drank and tried to enjoy themselves in defiance of the austere world outside.
Personal and political dynamics
Authors: Hooper Beverley
Published: May 2017

Although personal relationships could be intense in China, even in cases where both parties were foreigners, politics was a more pervasive factor in many people’s everyday lives. The broad recruitment of Western teachers and polishers created a politically diverse community in which conversations invariably turned to present-day China and people’s attitudes towards it. For those with a scholarly interest in China, the foreign expert sojourn was often an early phase of a lifelong involvement with the country. But these were also the people who felt most keenly their marginalization from Chinese society.
Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues
Authors: Kam Tan See
Published: May 2017

Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong New Wave film Peking Opera Blues (1986) is set in a China marked by contestations between Republican democrats and monarchist revivalists (circa 1913). Through various acts of reading film in different (though intertextually connected) ways along a formalist-historical-postmodernist continuum this book offers various reading strategies which reveal the film’s richness in terms of textual contours, textual affects, and ideological influences. Five acts of reading are explored which variously and collectively deconstruct the film’s playful intertextual and hypertextual configurations. Tsui Hark’s filmmaking career is summarized, and a polysemous analysis of the film’s story and form; its historical background; a companion film Shanghai Blues; Peking opera; Canto-pop and Mandarin songs; mandarin ducks and butterfly fiction; and the “three-women” film in Chinese-language cinema, are all explored within the general context of Hong Kong New Wave filmmaking and the issues of Chinese identity, culture, power in the contemporary politics of Hong Kong as they pertain to the Sinophone realms of articulations. Overall, the book asks a central question for film studies: does the film as a cultural and social artifact merely tell stories about the past or does it seek to reclaim lost territory in metafictional ways, with significant resonance for reading contemporary situations?
Setting the Scene
Authors: Kam Tan See
Published: May 2017

The Introduction contextualizes Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues both in the light of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since Republican times, and in the light of his own filmmaking career. It suggests that politically committed youth, and so-called revolutionaries, seeking social transformations in the post-imperial China depicted in this film, may well have parallels in contemporary Hong Kong especially post 1997. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s specific, and well-received, contributions in cinema, some social, political and cultural contexts, particularly related to questions of Chinese identity, culturation, citizenship and colonialism, together with some of the issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong and Sinophonic filmmaking, are raised in order to prepare the ground for situating five different acts of reading film (through multiple theoretical and analytical lenses) in the chapters to follow.
Story and Structure
Authors: Kam Tan See
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyses Peking Opera Blues through the lens of formalism and its structuralist narratology which produce cinematic codes that give the film its form, including Tsui’s auterist signatures such as cluttered mise-en-scène and rapid editing style. It focuses on the film’s story, style, structure, tone, and imagery, deploying the methodologies of singular shot, shot-by-shot, and mise-en-scène analyses with respect to compositional and editing matter. Accordingly it develops analytical templates for close readings of film structure and narrative. This yields a descriptive detailing of film form, drawing attention to specific cinematic effects and affects by outlining in tabular form the“grammar” of filmmaking and consequently highlighting the formal logic of shot compositions and shot assemblages, the integration of imagery and sound, and various narrative and performative elements.
Three-Women Fiction, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies
Authors: Kam Tan See
Published: May 2017

At work in Peking Opera Blues is a deeply intertextual relation to the film adaptations (three-women films) of a popular form of sentimental romance fiction - mandarin duck and butterfly fiction (yuanyang hudie) - which emerged when China, after thousands of years of dynastic rule, first experimented with democracy as an alternative mode of governance and lifestyle. This “fiction of comfort” came under attack by the May Fourth Movement after 1919, and was eventually consigned to the margins of modern Chinese literature. Reading through the lens of “three-women” films like Fate in Tears and Laughters (1932), Three Modern Girls (1933), Sun Moon Star (1960), and The Story of Three Loves (1963), and their women-centered narratives, enables a reading of Peking Opera Blues which reveals some of the ways in which Tsui Hark is able to emphasize the idea of women as narrative images; to highlight female agencies and subjectivities and to explore the rising status of women in the more globally connected, post-Confucian, and post patriarchal consumerist society of Hong Kong.
Introduction
Authors: Antony Robert J.
Published: May 2017

The central concerns of this book are crime and law enforcement in Guangdong province in south China during the mid-Qing dynasty, roughly the years from 1760 to 1845. The author’s focus is on bandits, sworn brotherhoods, and local law enforcement. Specifically, this study is divided into three parts: one, preventive measures and protective strategies; two, crimes, criminals, and community; and three, state and local law enforcement. The first part addresses the interactions of state and local communities in developing protective measures against banditry. The second part analyzes the activities, composition, and organization of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods in Guangdong. The third part examines in detail the policies, especially the adoption and application of laws, employed by the Qing government for suppressing these criminal associations and curbing their activities. This study, therefore, focuses on collective predatory crime and the legal responses of the state to those crimes. My purpose is to fill a hiatus in the existing scholarship on Chinese social history by examining mid-Qing Guangdong through the perspective of crime and law enforcement.
Instructing the People and Disseminating the Laws
Authors: Antony Robert J.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 3 discusses the Qing state’s attempts to prevent crime and maintain social order through the dissemination of law and moral suasion. For the state this meant that educating the people about the law was a vital preliminary step in crime prevention. Officials distributed throughout the empire copies of the law code and imperial injunctions and required that each community establish semi-monthly community lectures to explain them. Important laws and local regulations were routinely posted in markets and at city gates, often engraved on stone steles. Officials also encouraged lineage and family elders to teach their members about what conduct was appropriate and legal. Nonetheless, despite all the efforts of the state to disseminate the law among the lower orders, in and of themselves, these measures had little impact on actual law enforcement and deterrence of crime.
Community Security and Self-Defense
Authors: Antony Robert J.
Published: May 2017

Chapter 5 analyzes local self-regulation and law enforcement efforts. In conjunction with government, local communities also devised various methods for their own security and self-defense. Despite the state’s efforts and accomplishments in reaching down into local communities, the countryside was too vast and populous for state agents to penetrate everywhere. Normally the government preferred not to intervene directly in local affairs, but rather, to do so only indirectly through community lecture (xiangyue) and mutual surveillance (baojia) agents. Occasionally, in times of crises, the state would intervene more directly, such as in cases of famine relief and the suppression of riots and rebellions, but more routine security matters were normally left to each individual community. Rural towns and villages adopted a number of strategies for self-protection against bandits, including walls and other fortifications, guardsmen units, crop-watching associations, and militia. Nonetheless, I also argue that there was a complicated mix of activities in local communities involving both protection and predation.