Ethnic minority cinema in China's nation-state building / Kwai-Cheung Lo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lo, Kwai-Cheung.

Series:

China understandings today.

China Understandings Today

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Social aspects--China.

Motion pictures.

Minorities--Government policy--China.

Minorities.

China--Ethnic relations.

China.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (341 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2025.

Summary:

"Ethnic Minority Cinema in China's Nation-State Building investigates the convoluted relations between the cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China's nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the twenty-first century. The glossy, but superficial, cinematic depictions of non-Han ethnic minorities manufactured and manipulated by state authorities have deeply penetrated the Chinese psyche of what an ideal multiethnic nation should be like, with these visuals changing what it means to be Chinese under political unification. Kwai-Cheung Lo understands these ethnic minorities as part of a larger ecosystem and alludes to the cultures, values, and life practices of non-Han ethnic minorities as closely entwined with environmental issues and politics. This intertwining, Lo argues, suggests a crisis in "objectification and identification" of both people and the environment, that plays out in cinema featuring ethnic minorities. Lo traces these representations of Chinese ethnic minority groups in films created by both members of the Han-majority and non-Han filmmakers, examining how these representations became a site in which state authorities, Han and non-Han communities, and foreign agencies compete and interact under the larger context of building and imagining the Chinese nation-state. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Ethnic Minority Ecosystem in the Formation of Modern China

One. Cinematicity, Ethnic Gestures, and Republican China's Rescue Mission

Two. Hearing Like a State: Revolutionary Voice, Musical, and the Making of (Hetero-)Utopia in the Socialist China of the 1950s and 1960s

Three. What Came after Chinggis Khan: The Steppe Reimagined in Ecological Politics

Four. Ecology of Fear: Cinematic Surveillance and Biopolitical Governance of Islam

Five. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama Is Not the Message: Depicting Life beyond Spirituality in Tibet Cinema

Six. Transnational Ethnic Filmmaking as Cultural Ecology

Epilogue: A Global Theory of Ethnic Minority Cinema from China?

Notes

References

Index.

Notes:

Title from eBook information screen..

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-274) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472904884

0472904884

OCLC:

1453518470

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access