Crossings: Asian Cinema and Media Culture – serie

Malaysian Cinema in the New Millennium offers a new approach to the study of multiculturalism in cinema by analysing how a new wave of filmmakers champion cultural diversity using cosmopolitan themes. Adrian Lee offers a new inquiry of Malaysian cinema that examines how the ‘Malaysian Digital Indies' (MDI) have in recent years repositioned Malaysian cinema within the global arena. The book shines a new light on how politics and socioeconomics have influenced new forms and genres of the post-2000s generation of filmmakers, and provides a clear picture of the interactions between commercial cinema and politics and socioeconomics in the first two decades of the new millennium. It also assesses how the MDI movement was successful in creating a transnational cinema by displacing and deterritorialising itself from the context of the national, and illustrates how MDI functions as a site for questioning and proposing a new national identity in the era of advanced global capitalism and new Islamisation. Covering all these interrelated topics, Lee’s book is a pioneering and comprehensive work in the study of Malaysian cinema in the recent decades.

A pioneer investigation of Chinese cinema and the Chinese film industry. In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second-largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture.

In Socializing Medicine, Pao-chen Tang, Yuqian Yan, and Ling Zhang explore the intersections of medicine, health, and East Asian media. Interweaving archival research, audiovisual analyses, and theoretical insights from the emerging field of health humanities, the book reveals the multifaceted ways in which the mass media from photography and film to television and live streaming has been deployed as a tool for controlling medicine and health, privileging those with power and authority from the early twentieth century to the present. Adopting anti-colonial and anti-capitalist perspectives, the contributors in this volume challenge the dominant mediations of health against the backdrop of imperialism, Cold War geopolitical tensions, and neoliberal capitalism. Collectively, they advocate for alternative understandings of medical culture through media productions that envision accessible and equitable healthcare practices.