Recent years have witnessed the growth of a body of literature concerned with what Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu has termed “Chinese cinemas,”1 sparked by the increased international visibility of films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and characterized by an emerging interest in the ways that such works negotiate both “the triumphantly…[Read more]

A Bakhtinian Analysis of Language and Multiculturalism in Iwai Shunyi’s Swallowtail Butterfly

Scholarship on representations of East Asian women has honed on the ubiquity of a ‘geisha’ stereotype in Asian-themed Hollywood films: women who willingly acquiesce to the prerogatives of Western men and, in so doing, symbolically affirm the subordination of East Asian political autonomy to a paternalistic United States. Within this context, the…[Read more]

This paper examines two documentary essays focusing on landmark architecture in the transnational Øresund region comprising Copenhagen and Malmö. I argue that the motif of construction and deconstruction is congruous to our understanding of the ways identities are negotiated vis-à-vis spatial experience. In the lms, the multiple trajectories of…[Read more]

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski, The Stranger’s opening voiceover poses the following question: In a world controlled by “I’s,” by states intent upon realizing an extreme freedom through violence, how should the singular person respond?

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