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Menacing Environments

Ecohorror in Contemporary Nordic Cinema

By Benjamin Bigelow

Known for their progressive environmental policies and nature-loving citizens, Nordic countries also produce what may seem a counterintuitive film genre: ecohorror, where distinctions between humans and nature are blurred in unsettling ways. From slashers to...

Lahore Cinema

Between Realism and Fable

By Iftikhar Dadi

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore,...

The Story of Propaganda in 50 Images

By David Welch

From ancient Greek coinage to the sound bites of modern-day political spin doctors, propaganda has existed for thousands of years. But it was in the twentieth century that the art of persuasively communicating ideas truly...

Racial Erotics

Gay Men of Color, Sexual Racism, and the Politics of Desire

By C. Winter Han

Sexual desire, often understood as personal erotic preference, is frequently seen as neutral, natural, or inevitable. Countering these commonplace assumptions, Racial Erotics shows how sexual partnering within communities of gay men is deeply embedded within...

The Borders of AIDS

Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

By Karma R. Chávez.

As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as...

Thai Cinema Uncensored

By Matthew Hunt

In this first full-length study on the topic, Matthew Hunt—with access to rare and controversial films—provides a history of film censorship in Thailand. Hunt outlines its beginnings in the country, when films were censored by...

South Asian Filmscapes

Transregional Encounters

By Elora Halim Chowdhury, Esha Niyogi De

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947...

Circulating the Code

Print Media and Legal Knowledge in Qing China

By Ting Zhang

Contrary to longtime assumptions about the insular nature of imperial China’s legal system, Circulating the Code demonstrates that in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) most legal books were commercially published and available to anyone who could...

Return to the Land of the Head Hunters

Edward S. Curtis, the Kwakwaka'wakw, and the Making of Modern Cinema

By Brad Evans, Aaron Glass, Bill Holm

Photographer Edward Curtis’s 1914 orchestrally scored melodrama In the Land of the Head Hunters was one of the first US films to feature an Indigenous cast. This landmark of early silent cinema was an intercultural...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Network Sovereignty

Building the Internet across Indian Country

By Marisa Elena Duarte

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and...

Reporting for China

How Chinese Correspondents Work with the World

By Pál Nyíri

While Western media are shrinking their foreign correspondent networks, Chinese media, for the first time in history, are rapidly expanding worldwide. The Chinese government is financing most of this growth, hoping to strengthen its influence...

Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”

Contemplating the Art of Existence

By Ursula Lindqvist

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The “songs” of...

Zina Saro-Wiwa

Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?

By Amy L. Powell. With Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa, Stephanie LeMenager, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Taiye Selasi, and Zina Saro-Wiwa

Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance? is the first publication on the work of Zina Saro-Wiwa, a British-Nigerian video artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Occupying the space between documentary...

Icons of Danish Modernity

Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen

By Julie K. Allen

Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842-1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early twentieth-century Denmark....

The Power of Song

Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

By Guntis Smidchens

The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “Singing Revolution.” When attacked by Soviet soldiers in public displays of violent...

Verse Going Viral

China's New Media Scenes

By Heather Inwood

Verse Going Viral examines what happens when poetry, a central pillar of traditional Chinese culture, encounters an era of digital media and unabashed consumerism in the early twenty-first century. Heather Inwood sets out to unravel...

Family Revolution

Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture

By Hui Faye Xiao

As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a...

Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)

By C. Claire Thomson

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (“The Celebration”) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity — no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director,...

Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love

By Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in...