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Full-Text Articles in Asian American Studies
Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’S Cinematic Discontent In A Touch Of Sin, Yanjie Wang
Violence, Wuxia, Migrants: Jia Zhangke’S Cinematic Discontent In A Touch Of Sin, Yanjie Wang
Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works
This article examines the representation of violence in Jia Zhangke's film A Touch of Sin (2013) in light of Žižek's theory of ‘objective violence’ and the wuxia tradition. Jia attempts to understand the rise of individual violent incidents during China's post-socialist transformations by laying out the social, historical and political milieus in which they take place. He unveils the Žižekian objective violence hidden in the realm of social normality, pinpointing the country's sins of collusion with the global capital to impose injustice on the poor and disadvantaged. Invoking the wuxia genre, Jia portrays the protagonists not so much as perpetrators …
Heterogeneous Time And Space: Han Shaogong’S Rethinking Of Chinese Modernity, Yanjie Wang
Heterogeneous Time And Space: Han Shaogong’S Rethinking Of Chinese Modernity, Yanjie Wang
Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works
This article is set against the post-Mao official discourse on modernity, in which the conceptualization of a homogeneous, progressive time dominates the public consciousness. The focus is on Han Shaogong, one of the most important writers and cultural theorists in contemporary China, and on how he imagines a heterogeneous spatiotemporality away from the centralized and teleological paradigm. Han’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of time and space puts the homogenized, Hegelian-Marxist, developmentalist logic at the core of China’s modernization project into question. The article begins by examining how the linear and evolutionary concept of time has determined the perception of history …