Performing the Resurrection: James Graham and the Multiplication of the Real

In contrast to recent work on the charlatan James Graham which locates him in relation to medical history, this paper focuses on his various performances, the theatrical spaces he constructed (or imagined) for them, and the ‘other’ realities that these spaces and performances were designed to conjure. It argues that in the unprecedented commercial and cosmopolitan milieu of late eighteenth-century London, the charlatan emerges as the uncanny double (rather than straight-forward antagonist) of the scientist and the artist, from which both must struggle to distinguish themselves. Both romantic poet and enlightenment scientist are concerned to manage the relation problematized in a culture of simulation, between first-order and second-order realities. The charlatan is the uncanny double of both of these projects because he raises the possibility that each attempt to mediate between these realms will be revealed as one more simulation, and that artist, scientist, and charlatan will be found to be the ‘guardian saints' of a culture shaped to a single identity by lawless difference.     

Escaping to the country: Media,nostalgia, and the new food industries

Over the past decade in the West, television cooking shows have popularized interest in the provenance of food against a backdrop of public concern about the practices of industrial food production. This article explores two series that offer self-sufficiency as a solution to the problem of industrial agriculture. Escape to River Cottage and Gourmet Farmer each centre on a narrative of a city-dweller moving to the country to set up a smallholding. With their nostalgia for an earlier—simultaneously unproblematic and emotionally fulfilling—time of food production, these series imagine a Utopian lifestyle in which audiences are encouraged to choose to produce and consume differently. That it is (middle-class) men who are rediscovering traditional food practices highlights how media discourses surrounding food production can become entangled in gendered representations that give rise to niche food products and experiences designed to ameliorate feelings of risk and uncertainty in contemporary food systems.     

Real Totems, Living Fossils：Cultural origins and artistic charactenstics of clay dogs In Huaiyang

Cultural Origins
Huaiyang is known as the seat of capital founded by Fu Xi, a legendary emperor in pre-history China. It is said that the head bones of Fu Xi are buried here. His mausoleum is now called ＂Temple of Human Ancestor＂. A popular legend is widespread among local people that Fu Xi and Nu Wa （a legendary goddess） got married and created human beings with clay. Every year from the second of the second lunar month to the third of the third lunar month, temple fairs will be held in the Temple of Human Ancestor when traditional festivities and trade fairs take place.     

A Chinese in the new world: television dramas,global cities,and travels to modernity

Abstract

After having lain dormant for some 20 years during 1973 and 1991, the Singaporean film industry is experiencing a revival. Films produced since the early 1990s have been resolutely ‘local’ in their portrayals in an effort to ground this emergent cinematic modernity. Only a handful of these films have, however, received any international attention; most remain ‘too local’, ‘too colloquial’ to be exported further afield. This paper explores those visions or versions of the local presented in contemporary films from Singapore that simultaneously manufacture a brand of foreignness assimilable by international audiences. Through an overview of films from the revival period, this paper will show that the images that do travel successfully overseas are those that portray the dark side to Singapore’s road to economic modernization, the failed processes of an Asianized modernity. It is these images, representing one vision of an ‘authentic’ social reality, that is recognizable by international audiences in the context of previous successes by Asian films utilizing a shared form of (local) expression. My question is whether we can read these images as a particular kind of ‘slang’ – a vagabond expression that represents a filmic vernacular that also strategically invokes a cinematic modernity for the Singaporean film industry. This argument may extend to other (emergent) Asian cinemas that also participate in the production of this particular brand of foreignness. The paper will therefore provide some initial speculations towards the regionalization of cinema and ask whether such a move might be desirable and what its purpose might be.