Yomi Braester – författare

With forty-four original articles by contributors from Asia, Europe, and North America and working in a variety of different disciplines, the Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media offers the most comprehensive exploration to-date of the burgeoning field of Chinese digital media. Each chapter uses cutting-edge research to illustrate a different concept, principle, or methodology relevant to this interdisciplinary field, and collectively the chapters showcase some of the field's most exciting work while at the same time looking ahead to new directions the field may take in the future. While many of the chapters focus on phenomena related to mainland China, several look beyond mainland China to consider phenomena linked to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora. Topics include digital photography, internet literature, digital games, and social media, as well digital videos, documentaries, animation, and feature films. Themes include internet censorship, internet activism, digital ethnography, and piracy. Even as it attends carefully to many of the regional, national, linguistic, and cultural specificities of different digital formations associated with the Chinese nation, the Chinese language, Chinese culture, or technologies associated with Chinese corporations, the Handbook also offers a roadmap for how one might approach the broader category of digital media itself.

Witness against History offers fresh readings of milestones in twentieth-century Chinese literature and cinema. The book reveals how these texts and films, which seem to proclaim faith in modernity, nevertheless doubt the possibility of changing the course of history. In the aftermath of violent events, the authors question their ability to rescue the nation or even create a space for public debate. The witness against history is ultimately a critique of witnessing itself.

Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of space and time, representing the future city variously as an ideal socialist city, a metropolis integrated into the global economy, and a site for preserving cultural heritage. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with leading filmmakers and urban planners, and close readings of scripts and images, Braester describes how films and stage plays have promoted and opposed official urban plans and policies as they have addressed issues such as demolition-and-relocation plans, the preservation of vernacular architecture, and the global real estate market. He shows how the cinematic rewriting of historical narratives has accompanied the spatial reorganization of specific urban sites, including Nanjing Road in Shanghai; veterans’ villages in Taipei; and Tiananmen Square, centuries-old courtyards, and postmodern architectural landmarks in Beijing. In Painting the City Red, Braester reveals the role that film and theater have played in mediating state power, cultural norms, and the struggle for civil society in Chinese cities.

The book traces common concerns among East Asian cinemas of Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the PRC, and Taiwan, and goes beyond the now familiar notion that the Asian metropolises are successful iterations of local identity within a global network.