bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party
Authors: Nemoto Kuniaki
Published: March 2021

This article has two main purposes. First, it offers a critical meta-review of the literature on the recent evolution of the Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) party organization, by focusing on two of the LDP’s most entrenched institutions: factionalism and the policymaking process through the Policy Affairs Research Council (PARC). Although some scholars predicted that some of their functions—such as the posts allocation norm and the decentralized policymaking norm—may not disappear at least for a while, the article argues that these norms should be inefficient in theory. With the electoral reform to a party-centered system, the cabinet now needs to appoint able and loyal agents free from factions and formulate and implement programmatic public policy in a top-down manner. Second, in light of these theoretical predictions, it offers a critical evaluation of the LDP under Shinzō Abe’s second administration. A tentative conclusion that can be drawn from anecdotal evidence is that the LDP now looks different from the old LDP before the 1990s. Rather than using traditional, pre-reform governing styles, Abe’s second administration appeared to be adept at adapting to the new institutional environment.
Freedom and Spontaneity in the Creative Process: Lessons from Experimental Music
Authors: Bernstein David W.
Published: March 2021

This chapter focuses on composers who explored freedom and spontaneity in the creative process as alternatives to compositional systems with various formal rules and constraints. John Cage used chance operations and indeterminacy to compose music that allowed listeners unlimited interpretative freedom. Pauline Oliveros designed human/machine interfaces that created feedback resembling human intuitive and spontaneous interactivity. David Tudor created “live” electronic music in its most literal sense with idiosyncratic sound systems that produced sounds that took on a “life of their own.” Frederic Rzewski viewed spontaneous music as a transcendent and transformative creative process available to both musicians and non-musicians. Roscoe Mitchell developed composition/improvisation hybrids that challenge traditionally held assumptions about musical works in the Western canon. Embracing freedom and spontaneity as aesthetic values made it possible for these composers to challenge the dominant political ideology and its social conventions.
The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening
Authors: Cenciarelli Carlo
Published: March 2021

This introduction maps out the methodological and intellectual issues at stake in the study of “cinematic listening.” The first half argues that the vagueness of the “cinematic” and the elusiveness of “listening” can be productive if, instead of attempting to define what cinematic listening is, we focus on analyzing how changing notions of the “cinematic” and of “listening” have shaped each other through time, exploring cinema’s changing relationship with listening cultures past, present, and imagined. The second half offers an overview of the structure and content of this volume. It sums up how, by means of engaging with the archaeologies, aesthetics, and extensions of cinema’s aural protocols, each volume section contributes to our understanding of how listening to film is mediated by particular texts, places, and practices, and how listening cinematically extends beyond the texts, places, and practices typically associated with film.
Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History
Authors: Ward Meredith C.
Published: March 2021

In evaluating the success of twenty-first-century applications of surround sound technology, the popular press often fails to take into consideration the powerful role that history plays in their design. Dolby Atmos for Cinema (2012 –) has been marketed as groundbreaking and become a gold standard in cinema sound. Conceived of as a means to create a “platform” that would reach across the movie theatre, home theatre, music, and virtual reality for maximal profit, however, Atmos was always designed to move beyond it. Discussing both Atmos for Cinema and Atmos for Music (2016–), and drawing on first-hand interviews with industry insiders, this chapter situates Dolby’s platform into a longer history of multimedia surround technologies, and argues that its contribution to that history is first, in its reflection of the underrecognized hybridity of surround sound’s past, and second, to think of surround sound as a space to physically move through.
Summon the Cinematic?
Authors: Mon Ya-Feng
Published: March 2021

This chapter focuses on Remote Taipei (2017–18) by Berlin-based theatre group Rimini Protokoll. In keeping with Rimini Protokoll’s broader approach to theatrical productions, and with the global formula of Remote X, Remote Taipei uses the urban landscape as its stage. It sends audience members into the city wearing headphones, and guides them via a soundtrack that mixes voice, music, and sound effects. Combining theoretical, ethnographic, and autoethnographic approaches, this chapter tests the artist’s hypothesis that headphone listening would engender a sense of “filmic immersion.” It argues that the headphone mediation of Remote Taipei, while potentially triggering a quasi-cinematic experience that involved aural, haptic, and visual sensations, was also vulnerable to technological “disintegration,” and remained indeterminate at the level of local reception.
Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive
Authors: Dyer Richard
Published: March 2021

Ambient sound and silence largely function in film to hold narrative space and time in place. They are rarely allowed just to be—they must be made to speak. La Captive (Belgium/France 2000, dir. Chantal Akerman) is an interrogation of this impulse to interrogate aural opacity and absence, in the context of a male need to probe the female. Here, a woman’s silence becomes a refusal to be known by a man and the clacking of high heels becomes maddeningly erotic and elusive, while verbal interrogation leads nowhere and florid music functions as an excess of misleading expressivity. La Captive is structured both thematically and formally by listening, and it suggests the way that the latter, like looking, organizes the gendered epistemological drive of narrative and perception in film.
Hi-Yo, Rossini
Authors: Godsall Jonathan
Published: March 2021

This chapter discusses the use of the finale of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture (1829) as the theme of the multimedia Lone Ranger franchise, from the original radio show (1933–54) to the recent Disney film (2013). Rossini’s pre-existing piece is shown to be integral to the Lone Ranger brand, but also adaptable to suit the narratives and production circumstances of individual franchise iterations, while The Lone Ranger’s influence on listeners’ understandings of the finale—now heard as post-existing music—is argued to be significant in both semantic and structural regards. Exploration of the whole franchise reveals how Lone Ranger films appropriate pre-existing music in specifically cinematic ways. It shows that the 2013 film in particular reworks the finale to align with the modern-blockbuster style of its surrounding Hans Zimmer score, and thereby encourages audiences to adopt a blockbuster-cinematic mode of listening, not least in relation to Rossini’s original.
Hearing Hearing? Reflections on the Kubrickian Soundtrack
Authors: Code David J.
Published: March 2021

This chapter approaches the phenomenon of “cinematic listening” through a combined critical consideration of “poetic” cinema and aural reflexivity. In the first instance, I draw on a longstanding, oft-neglected lineage of challenges to “narrative” assumptions about the filmic medium, exemplified (for example) in P. Adams Sitney, George Mekas, and Maya Deren. I then select examples from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) to suggest how a more “poetic” consideration of particular instances of “the hearing of represented acts of hearing” can refine critical understanding of particular, exceptional “narrative” moments in film. Opening out to adumbrate the relevance of this reframing to a wide variety of contemporary productions, I offer a further challenge, after Michel Chion and Kubrick himself, to the literary (and more broadly “vocal/verbal”) models that often go unchallenged in film theory and film music studies alike.
Listening–Feeling–Becoming
Authors: Mera Miguel
Published: March 2021

This chapter explores the sensory evolution of cinematic representations of surveillance, with a particular focus on the role of sound in shaping what I call the corpo-“real.” Cinematic representations of surveillance initially used sound to make “real” their affective and embodied impact but then evolve into bodies that are, literally, embedded within the surveillant apparatus. At the same time, the intensifying modes of embodied surveillance representation diminish the importance of discrete listening, which becomes subsumed within the audiovisual/body amalgam. I trace some of the ways in which surveillance has shifted its attention from the audible, and the sensory, to the embodied. As surveillance in society has expanded and intensified, film has attempted to grapple with challenging questions of interiority and exteriority through a journey from listening through feeling to becoming.
Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks as a Mother and a Daughter
Authors: Walker Elsie
Published: March 2021

This chapter analyzes embodied listening from a pedagogical and unusually personal, feminist point-of-view. It explores how two parts of the author’s identity (being a mother, and being a daughter whose mother died) teach her to hear cinema anew along with her students. By extension, it builds upon other sound scholarship (especially the work of Michel Chion), by stressing that every person’s experiences leads them to rehear all cinema with meaningful results. In this chapter, the author first draws from her experiences of motherhood while teaching the sound track of Babies (2010). Second, she reflects on witnessing her mother’s death in relation to teaching the sound track of a death scene from Ten Canoes (2006). Third, the author connects being in the presence of her mother’s silent body with teaching a conversation from An Examined Life (2008), featuring queer theorist Judith Butler and disabled artist-activist Sunara Taylor.
Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure
Authors: Smith Jeff
Published: March 2021

Over the past fifteen years, processing fluency has become an increasingly important research topic in mapping the contours of aesthetic experience. It refers to the ease with which our minds assimilate new information, and it plays an important priming function in the pleasure or enjoyment experienced during film viewing. Fluency occurs as the result of both stimulus features and contextual factors, which include, among other things, the exposure effect, repetition, dishabituation, and spontaneous recovery. It can also play a vital role in cinematic listening, predisposing auditors toward positive judgments of films based on the ways in which they trigger efficient recall of music’s formal patterns. Processing fluency, thus, figures as an important dimension of film and music cross-promotion, either by leveraging consumer interest in music ancillaries or by enabling spectators to re-experience films through their soundtrack albums.
Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)
Authors: Hubbert Julie
Published: March 2021

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been appreciated as an important contribution to New Hollywood filmmaking. Its disaffected characters and unconventional narrative structure challenged classical studio filmmaking paradigms and quickly garnered Malick a reputation as a countercultural or auteur filmmaker. For all the scholarship that this film has generated, however, comparatively very little has been said about the film’s equally transgressive soundtrack. Malick engaged the services of a composer but severely limited his duties, choosing instead to score most of the film himself with pre-existing recordings. Where nostalgic films from the period like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show used compilations of rock and popular, Malick used a strikingly eclectic compilation of pop and classical music, from Nat King Cole to Carl Orff and Erik Satie. Although this range of styles is at odds with the 1950s world of the film, the soundtrack closely reflects the radical changes happening to listening practices among counterculture youth in the late 1960s.
The “Trickality” of Listening in Early Musical Trick Films
Authors: Brown Julie
Published: March 2021

This chapter considers a small but distinct body of music-themed “trick films” that involve imaginative visualizations of music, sometimes also of the marvels and problems associated with new audio technologies. Exponents of the early “trick film” genre Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón saw the potential for film to facilitate both visual and audio-visual tricks, despite the medium’s material silence. The chapter suggests that the ubiquity of musical and vocal themes in early films, with sound visually materialized in imaginative ways, may reflect the fact that film-makers were struck by the inherent joke of the audio-visual incongruity created by a silent medium that displayed scenes taking place in a hearing world. These films often focused on new audio technologies, for which the opposite audio-visual relationship was true: sounds (re)produced by audio technologies lacked their visual source. For films involving sound reproduction subjects, there was a double incongruity—and perhaps, double the pleasure.
Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture
Authors: Winters Ben
Published: March 2021

This chapter examines historical presentational practices of sound film and, specifically, the extra music added to roadshow versions of films between the 1930s and 1960s—including Gone with the Wind, West Side Story, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It argues that such added music—which included overtures, intermission, entr’acte, and exit music—when combined with controlled theatrical lighting and use of the curtain, might have prompted a number of different cinematic listening experiences among audiences. It suggests that an understanding of these historical presentational practices might call into question comfortable assumptions about the nature of sound-film ontology and the relationship between cinema as “Text” and cinema as “Event”—issues that resonate with the discourse surrounding historically informed performance (HIP) practice in musicology.
Vocal Virtuosity, Value Creation, and the Transformation of Contemporary Gospel Music
Authors: Öhman Nina C.
Published: March 2021

This chapter argues that virtuosic gospel vocal performance constitutes a medium of spiritual value creation that produces communal power and facilitates what can be described as a trade of musicality—of commercial exchange centered around sacred music. Dorinda Clark Cole is a renowned gospel vocalist. In this chapter, Clark Cole’s concert at the Samsung Experience showroom in the Time Warner Center at the Columbus Circle area of New York City provides a productive site from which to examine the commercialization of gospel music because it involves exchange relations between a musical community and a corporate sponsor. A closer focus on the relationship between gospel music and capitalism in this context challenges a dichotomized notion of how gospel music circulates in varied sacred and secular arenas that seemingly represent incommensurate, even contrasting, systems of value. Through a musical analysis and an exploration of corporate interests in the concert, value creation through musical performance in a commercial setting is shown to forge social relations and produce power that sustains the regenerative nature of gospel music.
Political Leadership
Authors: Uhr John
Published: March 2021

This chapter draws on the fields of politics and performance to analyze the nature of leadership performance in contemporary political societies. It recovers neglected themes about leadership performance originally articulated by two political thinkers deeply interested in the role of public performance by political leaders, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Walter Bagehot, both of whom can help strengthen contemporary appraisals of leadership performance. The two thinkers evaluate leadership performance quite differently, using different performance standards. The eighteenth-century philosopher Rousseau devised a moral critique of modern liberalism, including a detailed evaluation of underdeveloped modes of leadership performance typical of modern liberal political regimes. Rousseau’s alternative leadership morality sketched in The Social Contract remains a powerful source for contemporary analysis of the limits of liberalism and of the options for more egalitarian, republican alternatives.
Performing Gestures at Protests and Other Sites
Authors: Dutt Bishnupriya
Published: March 2021

Performative manifestation of protests in recent times in India and elsewhere in the world are identified by gestures, which often emerge from protest sites, circulate in the public domain, and are seen as democratic articulations and dissent, particularly when right-wing state powers are trying to curb freedom of expression and subvert democratic practices. This chapter argues that the power of the gestural idiom surpasses the marginality of its location and has resulted in a large corpus of scholarly works focusing on theatrical gestures as protest dramaturgies and transgressive and agentive bodily idioms. In contrast to the growing right-wing rhetoric and cultural mobilization in spaces of mass congregations, which adopts stereotypical gestural rhetoric, these gestures of dissent can be read as self-critical, coming from theatrical practices, particularly those elaborated by Bertolt Brecht, influential in Europe and the postcolonial world. In addition, the chapter attempts to initiate a dialogue between theater and performance studies and studies in politics as common sites of performing dissent. The chapter further argues that, despite the difference in methodological approaches, there are potentials of critical dialogues across the disciplines. Case studies from contemporary India, relevant to the academic debates, describe and analyze religious festival and pilgrimage, instrumentalized for political electoral gains and a protest performance in civil society on the eve of the 2019 elections.
Care
Authors: Warren Narelle
Published: March 2021

Care is a concept characterized by its multiplicity of meanings, uses, and practices. It is deeply shaped by the affective contexts in which care take place. Political and social processes determine who can and does care—the work of care—and the recognition of this work. While grounded in individual relationships, care is performative insofar as it is made and remade through its provision and practice, which tells much about the power structures that surround its practice. This chapter examines these affective and performative dimensions of care through vignettes with Australian informal (unpaid) spousal caregivers. Care, as described by the participants, operates in two distinct ways. First, as they explicitly describe, their acts of care reflect what matters to them, their affective ties to another—their spouse who lives with Parkinson’s disease. All discussed care as a mutual endeavor characterized by reciprocity and meaning, resonating with Puig de la Bellacasa’s constitutive elements of care as commitment, doing, and obligation. Second, participants described their care practices as reflecting a deeply unequal gendered order in which the allocation of limited economic, social, and political resources were laid bare: who does and does not get paid in the delivery of care reinforces social and household inequalities. Attending to performativity allows a consideration of how such competing priorities are negotiated in everyday encounters of care.
Colonial Theatricality
Authors: Skwirblies Lisa
Published: March 2021

This chapter argues that references to the theater are never merely innocent metaphors but instead are historically and culturally determined modes of perception that allow us to see certain problems in the political realm such as authenticity, representation, and spectatorship as essentially theatrical problems. This is particularly the case in nineteenth century colonial discourse with its technique of theatricalizing the colonized people and places. As a “travelling concept,” theatricality is not bound exclusively to the realm of the theater nor to the discourses of theater and performance studies; it holds meaning and potential as an instrument for analysis in the field of political science as well. The cross-disciplinary possibilities of the term theatricality lie in the term’s applicability for a better understanding of both the theater-like character of the political and social domain as well as of the grammar of performance as an aesthetic medium.
Media Sites
Authors: Segall Kimberly Wedeven
Published: March 2021

This chapter looks at mass media as political performance in the sense that select ed bodies, images, and voices are part of a production with an intended audience. Alternative media offer different political performances in the sense that small-scale productions of marginalized communities use personal/ or communal voices to interrupt dominant structures. This chapter offers specific extended examples of the latter in particular, such as music videos and filmed performances. Distinguishing between mainstream press and its vernacular forms, this chapter suggests how alternative media performs a distinct psychological and political functions: enacting resiliencies, redefining citizenship, reviving racial solidarities. Contextualizing how mass media needs to be interpreted not for its neutrality but as a site of performance and politics offers a new lens on women’s protests.
Toward a Theatrical History of the Picket Line
Authors: Nield Sophie
Published: March 2021

This chapter proposes a theatrical history of the picket line, reading this particular political and performative site of struggle through the lenses of space and spectatorship in order to explore the boundaries of performance and theatricality. Tracking its evolution from the nineteenth century to the Thatcher era, the chapter interrogates the picket line in British industrial and labor history as a site of the interplay of legality and performativity, and argues for the value of reading the political picket through a theatrical lens. A picket line functions as both a practical enactment of rights in space (understood as an occupation of or claim on public space intended to make visible a form of collective identity) and the symbolic expression of workers’ rights to organize and act collectively. Its theatricality resides in this space between symbolic and practical action, in the relationship between presence (a literal placing of bodies in space) and representation as a process of claim-making. The encounter produces affects and behaviors carrying implications beyond the immediate point of conflict: Who owns labor? Who has the right to act collectively? Who holds responsibility for these issues? These issues remain central to debates around labor, conditions, contracts, and rights today, involving the right to unionize, the effective return of zero-hours contracts, and the destruction of communities historically rooted in shared industrial labor.
What’s in a Name?
Authors: Hadley Bree
Published: March 2021

In the past three decades disabled scholars, artists, and their allies have highlighted the politics of representing the disabled body in theater, film, literature, museums, and the media. They have begun to address a problematic legacy of visibility-without-agency by advocating for positive self-representations of disabled people across a range of arts practices. Terms like disabled, handicapped, and crippled have been critiqued and in some cases reclaimed to articulate the distinctiveness of crip culture and performance. Terms like disability arts, arts and disability, artists with disability, and disability-led arts practice have been applied to politicized performance by disabled artists. This chapter argues that such terms have in effect become politicized performative gestures in their own right, which enact and guide the enactment of a disability rights agenda. It examines how artists’, archivists’, and historians’ efforts to relabel past work—to redact offensive labeling of disabled people as other from the historical record—is impacting our understanding of the evolution of this field of politicized practice. It also examines the impact changing ways of labeling art about, with, and by disabled people today is having. Labels certainly can be critical political gestures, designed to achieve critical maneuvers at critical moments in time, along the trajectory toward rights for disabled people. However, the idea that labels will serve in perpetuity, both in prospect and in retrospect, in wholly unproblematic ways, is less certain. In this sense, labels designed to support specific political shifts may always be “right for now” rather than “right forever.”
Immersion
Authors: Sauter Willmar
Published: March 2021

This chapter presents various kinds of immersion, in which terms such as presence, participation, curiosity, and reflection are relevant aspects of public communication. It reconsiders some traditional schemes of communication and their applications in theater and performance studies as well as aesthetic theories that underline the position of the beholder. To make ideas of the spectator’s immersive involvement as concrete as possible, it refers to a contemporary trilogy of plays performed as Women in Science, in which various communicative strategies and techniques were employed. The attention is directed toward the watching B(eholder) as constitutive of theatrical communication, while the performing A(gent) can assume a wide variety of shapes. The beholder’s immersion has a close affinity to political activities.
Protest and Performativity
Authors: Cadena-Roa Jorge , Puga Cristina
Published: March 2021

Protests are contentious actions that pose claims to other parties. Protesters seek attention and voice or demand that a third party act (or stop acting) in a way that prompts grievances or causes suffering to the protesters or others. Protestors raise claims for a range of reasons, material, legal (such as rights and protections), and symbolic. Often all the claimants want is to call the authorities’ attention to certain issues because their efforts to be listened to through regular means have been ignored. Protests have been part and parcel of Mexican politics since postrevolutionary times. These protests routinely incorporate performative innovations into their repertoire in order to gain public support and have their demands met. This chapter analyzes the components of performance in protest and discusses a range of contrasting case studies from Mexico, highlighting features such as empathy and identity through performance.
Interruption and Interpellation
Authors: Bala Sruti
Published: March 2021

This chapter reflects on the significance of interruption in performance. Under which conditions might interruption be deemed political? And what precisely accords such interruptive gestures an interpellative quality, the capacity to usher a sense of political subjecthood into being? The chapter dwells on three scenes of interruption: in Walter Benjamin’s writings on Bertolt Brecht, in Louis Althusser’s ideology theory, and a scene from a 2018 public lecture-performance in Amsterdam by the scholar-artist Chokri Ben Chikha., In the artist’s gesture toward self-immolation, the protocols of theatrical performance are interrupted in order to reflect on the political efficacy of performance. By way of a complementary reading of Benjamin’s elaboration of the Brechtian ‘gestus’ and Louis Althusser’s conception of ideological interpellation, the chapter suggests that performance and politics are related by the ways in which they interrupt and interpellate each other.
The Body Politic and JFK’s Bad Back
Authors: Peetz Julia
Published: March 2021

In politics, embodiment, figured as a literal connection between a national leader’s body and the nation as a whole, implies that the fates of leader and nation are linked; a decline in the leader’s body signals a corresponding decline in the national body politic. This concrete, physical idea of embodiment emerged from a context of absolutist monarchical power and has been most influentially described in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies as both theological and premodern. Nevertheless the temptation persists to describe the power and influence populists hold over their followers in the contemporary moment in just this way. Focusing on the specific context of US presidential politics, this chapter questions whether ideas of literal embodiment can usefully explain how populist politics operates through performance. With regard to the ways in which we interpret the significance of politicians’ bodies in twenty-first-century US politics, the chapter explores the process through which premodern political embodiment was supplanted by more abstractly conceived political representation. It is argued that, rather than postulating a radical break between mainstream politics and the mode of representation that is enacted by populists, explorations of embodiment need to take into account historical continuities as politicians’ embodied performances engage with the collective memory of political audiences and thereby complicate processes of political representation. As such, embodiment must be understood as one of the central repertoires of affective, metalingual engagement through which performances in contemporary politics act upon political audiences.
Performance and Populism
Authors: Lotina Goran Petrović
Published: March 2021

Seeking return of democracy into the realm of politics and popular sovereignty into state institutions, populist movements and political parties arose across the world in the early years of the twenty-first century on both sides of the political spectrum. Whether conceived as a way of doing politics, ideology, style, figure, discourse, political logic, or strategy, populism in all these views implies a moment of division between the people and the elite. This is why the debate about populism is a political debate about constructing the people, that is, new forms of subjectivity, community, or collectivity. To envisage alternative ways of living together, some political philosophers from the left found inspiration in the horizontal, leaderless civic movements, such as Occupy, and the notion of the self-organized multitude. Others found inspiration in the vertical civic movements with leadership, such as Podemos, and the notion of constructed people. The segmentation of civic and political structures that emanates from such a dualism prevents the left from displacing neoliberalism, arresting the increasing institutionalization of right-wing populism and invigorating democracy. To find a way out of this deadlock and empower the left, this chapter envisages the relationship between these disparate views in co-constitutive terms. What I will be calling the choreography of articulation is the performative practice that transforms horizontality into verticality, embodying the multitude of democratic identities in a popular form of collectivity. The performance 100% City by the German-based ‘collective’ Rimini Protokoll offers a view on articulation as a choreographing practice of embodying imagined forms of collectivity.
Class, Race, and Marginality
Authors: Beswick Katie
Published: March 2021

This chapter considers how class and race are navigated through informal performances by marginalized subjects in New York City and London. Taking litefeet dance and grime music as objects of analysis (both performance forms developed and pioneered by working-class men of color), it argues that we can think of informal and ostensibly frivolous practices as importantly political, structuring our understanding of cities and contributing to social and cultural change compelled by injustices in the political system of late capitalism. The chapter posits space as a means of understanding the politics of global cities and the connections between different geographical locations. Drawing on ethnographic and observation work undertaken by the author between 2014 and 2020, it uses hip-hop practices taking place in different contexts as a way of exploring how those who are relegated to the city’s edges find ways to survive and to push back against the dominant order. The argument here acknowledges the impossibility for marginalized performance forms to bring about total structural change but delineates ways that informal practices might nonetheless participate in a politics (understood as a struggle over power) and contribute to processes of change, which may not be inherently radical but are nonetheless resistant.
The Community, the Nation, and Obligations to Future Generations
Authors: de Shalit Avner
Published: March 2021

Prima facie one’s obligations to the nation and to future generations might clash because of the tension between the particular, the concrete, and the contemporary versus the universal, the abstract, and the future-oriented. However, the nation is and should be regarded as an intergenerational community; this mode of thinking, called here “thinking like a nation,” yields concrete obligations to the not yet born, based in current persons and their strong belief that the nation constitutes their self, a self that transcends into the future. According to the transgenerational theory which is based on the nation, depleting resources or creating severe climate change harms contemporaries who regard the transgenerational community of the nation as what constitutes their self. However, some reasons why one should be cautious about thinking like a nation, especially when this becomes a chauvinistic attitude, are noted.
Intergenerational Cooperation and the Social Contract
Authors: Heath Joseph
Published: March 2021

John Rawls made the enormously influential suggestion that society can be conceived of as a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” governed by a “theory of justice,” which is a set of principles that specify an acceptable division of the “benefits and burdens of cooperation.” It follows, however, that if there are no opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation in a particular domain of social interaction, then these interactions cannot be governed by principles of justice. Certain commentators have argued that this analysis precludes the application of Rawlsian-style contract theory to questions of intergenerational justice, on the grounds that there can be no reciprocity between non-contemporaneous generations, and thus no possibility of intergenerational cooperation. Yet despite having become influential in the literature, this claim is incorrect, being based upon an overly narrow, direct conception of reciprocity. Many systems of cooperation, both in nature and in human society, are based on indirect reciprocity, where the individual from whom a benefit is received need not be the same as the individual to whom a benefit is provided. Once the possibility of indirect reciprocity is taken into account, one can see that there is no obstacle to the development of systems of intergenerational cooperation. The analysis of such systems provides the foundation for a contractual approach to questions of intergenerational justice.
Yin-Yang (Yijing) and the Bible
Authors: Collani Claudia von
Published: March 2021

Chinese religions, philosophy, and especially Confucianism constituted a great challenge for the Catholic mission since its beginnings in China in early modern times. This essay looks at the way the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, made several attempts to solve the problem. Niccolò Longobardo s.j., for example, refused to use Chinese terms for the Christian God, dismissing them as insufficient or atheistic. Most Jesuits, however, advocated for terms such as Tian, Shangdi, Tianzhu, and Taiji for God in China. The Mandate of the Vicar Apostolic Charles Maigrot m.e.p., prohibiting the use of the Yijing and Taiji as the Chinese name for God, became a great challenge for Joachim Bouvet s.j. in developing his Figurism. With this system, he found complements for Christianity in China and created a new theology combining Eastern and Western ideas. These efforts were stopped by the prohibition of the Chinese rites and by the historical-critical method for reading the old Chinese books.
Confucian Classics and the Bible
Authors: Huang Paulos , Yeo K. K.
Published: March 2021

After a brief survey of the encounter between the Confucian and Christian canons, the essay discusses the issues that arose when the Bible was translated into Chinese as Shengjing (the Holy Canon). To find out how Chinese Christians (missionaries and Chinese) treat Confucian classics and the way they translate and read the Bible in light of the Confucian language/classics, the essay explores the following issues: (1) the distinction between the Bible being interpreted as the Holy Canon and Confucian classics being considered as humanistic Canons; (2) the kind of authority that can raise a jingdian (classic) into a jing (canon) in the Chinese context; and (3) the fact that, because Confucians understand canons in the light of humanistic criteria, they treat the Bible as a humanistic classic rather than a divinely revealed canon. The essay ends by introducing a Christian-Chinese intertextual reading of the Bible and the Analects and a proposal of “Sino-Christian academic biblical studies.”
The Bible and Daoist Writings
Authors: Lee Archie C. C.
Published: March 2021

The Bible has taken various journeys all over the world and has come into engagement with religious writings outside of Christianity. In the process of translation of the Bible into other languages, religious notions from indigenous writings have been employed to express biblical conceptions, giving rise to cultural fertilization and religious enrichment on the Bible and the target languages into which the Bible has not only taken on a new form, but also some sort of transformation. This essay explores first the historical encounters of Christianity with Chinese culture in the tradition of Jingjiao (mistakenly labelled as Chinese Nestorianism). Second, an attempt is made to analyze the Daoist terminology of hundun in Daodejing and Zhuangzi adopted for the articulation of the “void” (“Chaos”) in the creation narrative of Genesis. Finally, the Daoist quest for immortality is read cross-textually with the Wisdom book of Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes).
Chinese Protestant Bible Versions and the Chinese Language
Authors: Mak George Kam Wah
Published: March 2021

This essay discusses the relationship between Chinese Protestant Bible versions and the Chinese language. It first introduces the varieties of the Chinese language adopted and linguistic techniques used in these Bible versions produced in the late Qing and Republican era, so as to illustrate how Protestant Bible translators’ understanding of the Chinese language informed their choices. It then explains how Protestant Bible translation was relevant to the evolution of the Chinese language with the example of the Mandarin Bible, which contributed to the development of Mandarin from a lingua franca into the national language of China. This essay concludes with a discussion of the value of Protestant Bible versions as materials for the historical study of the Chinese language.
Adoption of Christian Anthropology by Chinese Intellectuals
Authors: Jian Cao
Published: March 2021

In their search for justification in a scriptural text, both Christian and non-Christian Chinese intellectuals in the modern era found the Old Testament a rich and promising source at times of cultural and national crises. In this paper, three major topics will be taken up. First, it will explore the ways in which the Chinese Old Testament and its idea of God were anthropologically interpreted by Chinese intellectuals in light of modern scientism, European and American philosophy, and Chinese traditional culture. Second, it will analyze how the idea of one God was utilized by Chinese intellectuals in their efforts to explain human nature and to promote individual morality. Finally, it will discuss how universal love, which was of special importance in the context of monotheism, was interpreted by Chinese intellectuals. These three topics lead to a common interest or agenda of the time: building up a society of human perfection.
Christian Poetry from Tang to Republican Era
Authors: Bao Zhaohui
Published: March 2021

This essay surveys Christian poetry in the Tang dynasty to the Republic of China era. It discusses two basic criteria for defining the constitution and requirements of Christian poetry. It also looks at poetic elements of Christian motifs and biblical genres as they were used in Christian poetry composed by foreign missionaries, non-Christians, and Chinese Christians. This essay also describes how Chinese Christian poets used the styles of Chinese poetry to express the themes of Christianity in different historical periods. According to this period, Xu Guangqi, Wang Zheng, Wu Li, Zhao Zichen, and Bing Xin are the important Christian poets. Wu Jingxiong, Zhu Weizhi, John Chalmers, and Frederick William Baller are excellent translators who translated Hebrew poems into Chinese poetic style. The essay discusses the contributions of Chinese Christian poetry to Chinese writing and the limitations of their writing based on context.
Study of the Bible in Chinese Academia
Authors: Huilin Yang
Published: March 2021

Since Christianity came to China, the Bible has been translated, preached, and studied, and church-based universities have been instrumental in the Bible being taught and studied in Chinese institutions of higher learning. For the mainland Chinese academic system, however, the history of studying and teaching the Bible is relatively short, getting traction only in the past four decades by this period surveyed in this essay. This essay observes that, since there is no clear distinction between “religious or non-religious” classics in the Chinese tradition, and because of Confucius’ emphasis on “inspiration from the Poems, steady with the ritual, and fulfillment in music,” both factors give literary reading a crucial role in the study of religious texts. Although the studying and teaching of the Bible in China’s academia also can be found in the fields of philosophy, ethics, history, and art, the “Bible as literature” is the most obvious feature, thus becoming the focus of this paper.
A History of the Chinese Bible
Authors: Choi Daniel Kam-to
Published: March 2021

The Bible in China, including the different versions of the Chinese Bible that circulate in China and in the Chinese diaspora, is the result of a long historical preparation. The Christian presence in China has a long but broken history; so does the history of Bible translation in China. This essay is a review of Chinese Bible translation history from the seventh century and focuses on the Chinese Bible after the early nineteenth century until the present. It presents a historical review of the Bible editions translated by Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox translators who worked on translating the whole or parts of the Bible into the common language and dialects of Chinese language.
The Bible and Popular Christianity in Modern China
Authors: Lee Joseph Tse-Hei , Chow Christie Chui-Shan
Published: March 2021

This essay investigates the influential role that the Bible played in the sphere of Chinese popular Christianity. It explores the widespread use of the Bible among the lay populace who were traditionally excluded from the concerns and pursuits of Chinese Christian elites in cosmopolitan cities. Beginning with an overview of the cultural influence of the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century, this study argues that the liberating power of the Word was leveraged by peasant converts looking for new cosmologies and norms to change society. The twentieth century witnessed multiple levels of direct engagement with biblical texts, unmediated by foreign missionaries, among Chinese evangelists and congregants. Some drew on new biblical inspirations to found independent churches and sectarian groups, and some relied on the practice of bibliomancy to seek guidance in times of chaos. These examples offer complex view of the symbiosis between Bible reading and conversion in Chinese popular Christianity.
Classical Languages in Chinese Biblical Studies
Authors: Leeb Leopold
Published: March 2021

Following the arrival of Christian missionaries in China, classical European languages also entered China. Whereas Chinese Catholic candidates for priesthood received Latin theological education since the seventeenth century, systematic teaching and learning of the biblical languages Greek and Hebrew only started in the early twentieth century. This essay gives an outline of the spread of classical languages in China, related missionary efforts, educational institutions, Chinese Bible translations, and early Chinese Latinists, some of them trained overseas. The last section considers developments of the twentieth century and the present state of the study of biblical languages in China.
The Bible and Chinese Minority Cultures
Authors: Hengtan Shi
Published: March 2021

Ethnic minorities mainly live in border areas, especially in the southwest of China. These ethnic minorities do not have “advanced” cultures and do not adhere to their cultural values strictly. When they encounter Christian belief, they regard it as strength and an opportunity to achieve their national rebirth and liberation. Their ancient myths and legends are quickly replaced and renewed by the Christian faith. This essay looks at the complex relationship between the biblical message and the cultures of ethnic minority, such as ethics, music, song, and dance, literature and education, festival, and marriage and family.
The Bible and Chinese Church Music
Authors: Chenhui Sun
Published: March 2021

Christianity came to China four times since the Tang dynasty, bringing with it the gospel of Jesus Christ with various biblical texts, interpretations, hymns, and songs. This essay surveys Chinese church music and shows the multi-cultural richness of worship life in the Chinese church. It will show that cultural differences do not hinder people of God in foreign cultural settings from understanding the Bible and seeking new ways of expressing their love and devotion to God. Yet, it also will show that, at the same time, Chinese believers seek to imitate and preserve the dominant musical style of Euro-American traditions.
Contextualizing Hymns and Songs for the Chinese Context
Authors: Hsieh Fang-Lan
Published: March 2021

This essay discusses the development of Chinese Christian hymns and songs from the early twentieth century to modern times. Some hymns and songs composed by early Chinese hymn writers are analyzed, such as the works of Hsi Sheng-mo, Dora Yu, Jia Yu-ming, Wang Zai, Wang Ming Wang-dao, John Sung, Watchman Nee, and John E. Su. In order to effectively bring the gospel and teach biblical truths to the people, they used words and expressions that resonated with and were understood easily by Chinese. In the 1930s, T. C. Chao began to promote the idea of contextualizing Christianity and hymnody to meet the needs of Chinese society. He wrote hymns for Hymns for the People (1931), which were paired with Chinese tunes arranged by missionary Bliss Wiant. Significant hymnals compiled for Chinese churches, as well as hymns and songs composed by contemporary hymn writers and Christian music groups, also are examined.