Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 

About: Modern Chinese Literature and Culture is an academic journal published by Edinburgh University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & China. It has an ISSN identifier of 1520-9857. Over the lifetime, 52 publications have been published receiving 139 citations. The journal is also known as: Zhongguo xian dai wen xue & MCLC.

Elvis, allow me to introduce myself : American music and neocolonialism in Taiwan cinema

Abstract: Music in Edward Yang's film oeuvre is characterized by a wide variety of styles. Disparity and disjunction seem to be key to Edward Yang's work. The disparity between the English and Chinese titles in several of his films1 points to Yang's embodiment of a hybrid identity: American, Chinese mainland, and Taiwan cultures. Born in Shanghai of Hakka origin, raised in Taiwan as a second-generation mainland emigre, and trained and employed as an engineer in the United States, Yang shuttles between his Chinese upbringing and a cosmopolitan sensibility. Compared to the films of another Taiwan director, Hou Hsiao-hsien, who prefers rural motifs, Yang's works are marked by urban themes and, more important, "giocai," hybrid cultural sentiments and wry humor. Yang's disparity registers in the fact that he has never made films outside Taipei, and that he is never interested in issues unrelated to the Taipei Ť I want to thank the anonymous readers for their constructive comments. I also want to thank Gina Marchetti and Darreil Davis for their suggestions.

A face in the crowd: imagining individual and collective disabled identities in Contemporary China

Abstract: This essay explores the concept of a “disabled crowd” in the Chinese cultural and social imagination. It highlights key terms, analogies, and cultural locations of disability that are seen to relate to and inform group identity and collective behavior, and interrogates these through close readings of a range of contemporary personal narratives and other sources related to the sociopolitical context. It reveals that the appropriation of new and enhanced opportunities for self-representation and self-advocacy is enabling a wide range of disabled people, both on an individual and group level, to “speak out” about their experiences of disability and, just as importantly, “be heard”. What it also shows, however, is that while some disabled people identify with and appear to derive intense personal and social benefit from being associated with a “disabled crowd,” others have used these new opportunities to re-imagine or distance themselves from that same crowd by offering up alternative narratives of what it means to be disabled in China today. In doing so, therefore, the article demonstrates the closely interrelated nature of self and group empowerment and identity in a country where the state has attempted to act as the guardian and voice of disabled people since the 1980s, but where that influence has been increasingly disrupted by voices from across the spectrum of disability.

Slashing Three Kingdoms: A Case Study in Fan Production on the Chinese Web

Abstract: The Three Kingdoms period, popularly taken as lasting from the chaotic last years of the Han to the unification of China in 280 CE, has been a lasting inspiration for the Chinese literary imagination.1 For more than a millennium, numerous works, from written to visual, have been produced about the Three Kingdoms, and the interest in the period is only growing stronger today. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi), a masterpiece of the Chinese novel produced in the fourteenth century, has been widely disseminated and reworked in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, making the fascination with the Three Kingdoms not just a Chinese but also an East Asian phenomenon. A new chapter in this long tradition of the construction of the Three Kingdoms imaginary has opened at the turn of the twenty-first century by a body of works produced by young Chinese female fans in cyberspace. This essay focuses on a particular subset of these fan works, namely, male-homoerotic fiction and music videos (MVs). In studying this particular subset of Three Kingdoms fan production on the † I am grateful to the two anonymous MCLC readers for their feedback and to Kirk Denton for his many corrections and comments.