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ID: 153389

Acting through the camera lens: the global imaginary and middle class aspirations in Chinese urban cinema / Guo, Shaohua

Guo, Shaohua	Journal Article
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Much has been written about the social composition of China’s rising middle class and their political and economic stances; yet little critical attention has been paid to the visual representation of middle class sensibility in China’s neoliberal era. This article engages in a comparative reading of the actress-turned-director Xu Jinglei’s films My Father and I (2003) and Go Lala Go! (2010), and investigates how Xu’s movies both cultivate and mirror prevalent middle class sentiments by romanticizing and subtly transgressing heterosexual gender relations. It argues that the intertextual reference between Xu’s films, her stardom and social transformation not only projects the cultural aspirations and imaginaries of middle class audiences, but also illuminates the inherent affinity between middlebrow culture, gender dynamics and Chinese urban cinema.

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Global Imaginary ; Camera Lens ; Middle Class Aspirations ; Chinese Urban Cinema

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ID: 172913

Lockdown: Gaza through a Camera Lens and Historical Mirror / Fields, Gary

Fields, Gary	Journal Article
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Gaza is often decried as a uniquely brutal open-air prison, but is the carceral condition imposed on the Gaza Strip part of a broader historical lineage of confinement landscapes? The argument in this essay is that Gaza belongs to a historically longstanding lineage of places and people subjected to practices of incarceration imposed on landscapes, and that the system of confinement in the Gaza Strip has escaped systematic comparison to these other confined spaces. To support this contention, the essay compares the prison-like conditions of Gaza to three examples of carceral environments: the early-modern, plague-stricken European town; the carceral landscape of the “cotton kingdom” in the antebellum American South; and the French system of confinement in the pacification of Algeria. Using both text and photographic images, this article also speculates that situating Gaza within this comparative frame at this moment offers new opportunities for changing the discourse about Gaza to a world seemingly indifferent to the injustices suffered by the Palestinians of Gaza.

Key Words

Gaza ; Camera Lens ; Historical Mirror

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