Beyond alterity
Subtitle: German encounters with modern East Asia
By: edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock
Series: Spektrum -- Volume 7
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
ISBN-13: 9781782383604; 9781782383611
Subjects: Relations; Intellectual life
Description: With the economic and political rise of East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century, many Western countries have re-evaluated their links to their Eastern counterparts. Thus, in recent years, Asian German Studies has emerged as a promising branch within interdisciplinary German Studies. This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies. Essays focus on the mid-century German-Japanese alliance, Chinese-German Leftist collaborations, global capitalism, travel, identity, and cultural hybridity. The authors include historians and scholars of film and literature, and employ a wide array of approaches from postcolonial, globalization, media, and gender studies. The collection sheds new light on a complex and ambivalentset of international relationships, while also testifying to the potential of Asian German Studies.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-299) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : re-investigating a transnational connection : Asian German studies in the new millennium / Martin Rosenstock and Qinna Shen; title: Beauty and the beast : Japan in interwar German newsreels / Ricky W. Law; title: Reflecting chiral modernities : the function of genre in Arnold Fanck's transnational Bergfilm the Samurai's daughter (1936-37) / Valerie Weinstein; title: Prussians of the East : the 1944 Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft's essay contest and the transcultural romantic / Sarah Panzer; title: Otherness in solidarity : collaboration between Chinese and German left-wing activists in the Weimar Republic / Weijia Li; title: A question of ideology and realpolitik : DEFA's Cold War documentaries on China / Qinna Shen; title: China past, China present : the Boxer Rebellion in Gerhard Seyfried's Yellow wind (2008) / Martin Rosenstock; title: Anna May Wong and Weimar cinema : orientalism in postcolonial Germany / Cynthia Walk; title: Rewriting the face, transforming the skin, and performing the body as text : palimpsestuous intertexts in Yuko Tawada's "The bath" / Markus Hallensleben; title: Love, pain, and the whole Japan thing : dancing ma in Doris Dörrie's film Cherry blossoms/Hanami / Erika M. Nelson; title: Hairnet manufacturing in Vysočina and Shandong 1890-1939 : an early globalizing home industry / Chinyun Lee and Lucie Olivová; title: Orbiting around the void : emptiness as recurring topos in recent German short stories on Japan / Gabriele Eichmanns; title: Discovering Asia in the footsteps of Portuguese explorers : East Asia in the work of Hugo Loetscher / Jeroen Dewulf.