Mela: festival scenes in South Asian cinema

This article examines a recurrent film motif across a number of South Asian films, mostly called Mela. It also offers some observations on melas, actual and allegorical, as represented in films but often seeming to exceed their containment in context so as to say more about the conviviality of life, where this is at issue, where life is at a juncture in need of resolution within the cycle of becoming. The issues of violence, loss, national identity, politics of interpretation and repetition in ideology are canvassed. While the essay is focused upon Mela films themselves, and South Asian film more broadly, it has of course been important to note work by scholars such as M. Madhava Prasad, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Anjali Gera Roy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the help of my students, some of whom are named below.     

玉米醇溶蛋白膜的制备及其在保鲜中的应用

研究了不同提取剂和不同固液比对玉米醇溶蛋白提取效果的影响,结果表明:以1∶6比例的60%丙酮为最佳提取剂.用玉米醇溶蛋白涂被剂保鲜小番茄,最佳涂被剂配方为:玉米醇溶蛋白1.75%,甘油0.18%,蔗糖0.5%,并辅以0.02%乳化剂与防腐剂,不仅可延长小番茄的贮藏期,还可减少小番茄在贮藏期间的营养成分损耗.     

气膜厚度对反气泡稳定性的影响

为观察气膜厚度对反气泡稳定性的影响,通过加热反气泡内外溶液来加热气膜内气体从而改变气膜厚度。实验发现:在一定温度范围内,加热反气泡气膜可以延长其稳定时间,但是当加热反气泡气膜使其厚度超过其稳定存在的阈值时,反气泡的稳定性会急剧下降甚至无法产生反气泡;在一定温度范围内温度对溶液表面张力影响很小,这使得文中实验数据合理化。本文为反气泡稳定性的理论研究提供实验支持,并考虑到气膜厚度为微米级,可为微米级气膜传热提供实验素材。     

基于影视剧语料库的蒙古语话语标记标注初探

话语标记是处于句子之外表达程序意义、能对话语的理解起到引导作用的词、短语和习惯表达式。它们形式多样,功能复杂,多存在歧义而影响句法分析的效果。随着蒙古语语料库建设进入句法—语义分析阶段,话语标记研究为自动标注和消除歧义提供了丰富的语言知识资源。     

Social inclusivity,cultural diversity and online film consumption

It has been argued that the circulation of film online is a “democratising process”, evident in the breadth and depth of international film now available online, and in the greater ease of access to this content for audiences across the world. This is seen by some to present greater commercial opportunities for film-making from countries marginalised by previous distribution networks, and to foster a more globally diverse and inclusive film-viewing culture, with particular benefits for diasporic populations. Others, however, have pointed to the way in which audiences’ engagement with film online may be constrained by the economics and technology of online distribution and cultural competencies rooted in social stratification. These factors may limit how and what audiences watch, extending beyond issues of physical access to those of cultural access. As such, they raise questions regarding the demographic composition of the audience for online methods of film distribution and different types of international film. We lack sufficient understanding of these issues, however, due to the limited emphasis upon socio-demographic variables in existing academic research into online film consumption, and the limited consideration of particular film content in relevant market research. This article uses original audience research to interrogate the extent to which online distribution is able to connect audiences to a diversity of international film in comparison to other methods of distribution. It also considers some of the socio-demographic characteristics of the audiences for different methods of distribution and types of international film. In doing so, the article grants us a clearer understanding of the degree to which online film distribution fosters diversity and inclusivity through the connections it facilitates between audiences and content.     

The Persuasive Influence of Nollywood Film in Cultural Transmission: Negotiating Nigerian Culture in a South African Environment

The popularity and viewership of Nollywood films have expanded across African and Western cities especially those with considerable Diaspora population. This study seeks to investigate whether watching Nollywood films is likely to lead to cross-cultural transmission of Nigeria’s cultural heritage to audience members in South Africa. Data for the study were collected using observation and surveys with Likert-type scales involving participants from a South African college. Results show that watching Nollywood films was significant in increasing participants’ knowledge and appreciation of Nigerian culture. Observed patterns indicate that a small portion of participants could mimic or reproduce some common Nigerian expressions and exclamations while a negligible percentage of participants could actually speak a smattering of Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major languages.     

Mumford on aesthetic–moral interaction in sport

Stephen Mumford argues that aesthetic and moral values in sport are interdependent, focusing on cases where immorality taints beautiful performance. This interdependence thesis is insightful but, I argue, in need of refinement, as its normative implications are unclear and perhaps implausible (e.g. the Nazi aesthetics problem). I also challenge Mumford’s perspective on the infamous Dynamo Kiev death match. Whereas Mumford claims that the match’s morally oppressive circumstances detract from it so that ‘it was not something knowingly we should have admired aesthetically’, I argue that, on the contrary, and in light of what Mumford says about other cases, such circumstances actually enhance the game’s aesthetics such that it would be wrong not to appreciate it aesthetically.     

Revulsion and awe: charting the development of the moral economy of capitalism and its hero in the American imagination,from the protestant ethic to ecstasy of the entrepreneur

ABSTRACT

The spirit of capitalism shifted throughout the twentieth century, Boltanski and Chiapello place it sometime in the period between the 1960s and 1990s [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London], for Bell it had happened by the mid-1970s and its contradictions were already apparent [1998, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books, New York]. David Harvey is more specific and cites 1979 as the dawn of the new era [2005, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London]. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship of the changing spirit of capitalism and read it through the development of the heroic figure of the American imagination, through the representation of the capitalist hero. Its aim is to situate the figure of the capitalist hero in the post-crash era and ultimately to understand the seductive power of the new capitalism that enables it to thrive. My thesis is that the seductive power of the new capitalism can be understood as an oscillation between revulsion and awe, we are both morally repulsed by the venality of capitalism yet also captivated by it. Revulsion and awe are at the core of the libidinality of the new capitalism and can be seen through the representation of the heroic object of the capitalist imagination.     

English education in the Indian multi-lingual classroom

In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema.     

Modernising gender,civilising sex: perverse imaginary in the state feminist politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu

Abstract

The gender sexual politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu has been pivotal in the hegemonic ascendancy of Taiwan state feminism in recent years. Through an examination of Liu’s psychoanalytically mediated essays of cultural criticism, this article traces the contour of Liu’s sexual imaginary within the context of 1990s feminist and queer politics. Liu’s modernising project of gender equality, I argue, upholds heterosexual monogamy as a feminist ideal that seeks to purge all the masculine ills, including perversion and promiscuity. Meanwhile, queers and prostitutes come to be figured as the very negativity that must be repressed. Yet, like the Lacanian Real, they impinge on the symbolic order that Liu ordains as they thwart her desire to civilise sex.