Carmen Blacker was an outstanding scholar of Japanese culture, known internationally for her writings on religion, myth and folklore - her most notable work being The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan.
Daniele Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub collaborated on films together from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s, making formally radical adaptations in several languages of major works of European literature by authors including Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Friedrich Holderlin, Pierre Corneille, Arnold Schoenberg, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini.
Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon, was given a limited run on its debut in 1927, but soon afterwards distributors in France and America, unwilling to deal with its nine-hour running time, subjected it to savage cuts - with devastating results for the movie and for film history.
This volume takes a fresh look at the various aesthetics emerging globally in the early sound film era, with a focus on the films' fundamentally experimental and inventive character.
The Asian Migrant's Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality brings together papers that investigate the way Asian migrants experience, think about, perceive and utilize their bodies as part of the journeys they have embarked on.
American folk music has long presented a problematic conception of authenticity, but the reality of the folk scene, and its relationship to media, is far more complicated.
Contemporary Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self examines urban communities and societies in Asia and the West to shed much-needed light on issues that have emerged as the world experiences its new urban turn.
Louis Van Gasteren was one of the most prolific filmmakers in the history of the Netherlands, with a resume that includes nearly eighty documentaries and two feature films-to say nothing of artworks and books.
During the course of Dutch physicist and Spinoza Prize-winner Ad Lagendijk's long and influential career, he has published more than 300 articles, supervised over thirty doctoral dissertations, and given countless presentations and conference addresses.
When the Allied Forces arrived in the Netherlands after Operation Market Garden, the country's long-awaited liberation from National Socialist occupation finally came in the summer of 1945.
The Suharto (1966-98) government of Indonesia and the Mahathir (1981-2003) government of Malaysia both launched Islamisation programmes, upgrading and creating religious institutions.
Tales of Transit brings together advances from the fields of transportation and social history, translation studies and literary scholarship to cast new light on the great transatlantic migration movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.
This collection departs from the observation that online forms of communication-the email, blog, text message, tweet-are actually haunted by old epistolary forms: the letter and the diary.
Global Modernity from Coloniality to Pandemic explores issues related to the global crises of our time: reason, science, and the environment by revisiting the notions of modernity, modernism, and modernization, which can no longer be considered purely Western or strictly secular.
Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element for understanding early modern science as a whole.
During the course of Dutch physicist and Spinoza Prize-winner Ad Lagendijk's long and influential career, he has published more than 300 articles, supervised over thirty doctoral dissertations, and given countless presentations and conference addresses.
Though these days, our celebrity culture tends to revolve around movie stars and pop musicians, there have been plenty of celebrity authors over the years and around the world.
Representations of shapeshifters are prominent in medieval culture and they are particularly abundant in the vernacular literatures of the societies around the North Sea.
Conjuring up all the glamour of the event, Jungen recounts the history of the Cannes Film Festival from an American perspective surveying the complex interplay of talent, money and corporate clout.
We normally think of early film as being black and white, but the first color cinematography appeared as early as the first decade of the twentieth century.
For centuries, French was the language of international commercial and diplomatic relations, a near-dominant language in literature and poetry, and was widely used in teaching.
This collection of essays explores the development of electronic sound recording in Japanese cinema, radio, and popular music to illuminate the interrelationship of aesthetics, technology, and cultural modernity in prewar Japan.
Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization critically explores Global Asia and the metropolization process, specifically from its alleyways, which are understood as ordinary neighbourhood landscapes providing the setting for everyday urban life and place-based identities being shaped by varied everyday practices, collective experiences and forces.
Portrayals of Women in Early Twentieth-Century China explores the role played by woman, and their visual representations, in introducing modern design and modern ways of living to China.
When people look at success stories among postcolonial nations, the focus almost always turns to Asia, where many cities in former colonies have become key locations of international commerce and culture.
This collection brings together a number of leading scholars in film studies to explore viewing and listening dispositives - the Foucauldian concept of a strategic and technical configuration of practices and discourses - from the emergence of film studies as a field in the 1960s to more recent uses of the concept.
This book examines the desire for, and intoxication with destruction as it appears in cultural objects and representation, arguing that all cultural and aesthetic value is fundamentally predicated on its own fragility, as well as the living transience of those who make and encounter it.
While Muslims in Indonesia have begun to turn towards a strict adherence to Islam, the reality of the socio-religious environment is much more complicated than a simple shift towards fundamentalism.