Rethinking Transnational Chinese Cinemas

The Amoy-Dialect Film Industry in Cold War Asia

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by Jeremy E. Taylor

Type

Studies

Subject

Countries > China

Keywords

China, spoken language, national cultures

Publishing date

2013

Publisher

Routledge

Collection

Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia

1st publishing

2011

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 192 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-415-72832-4

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Book Presentation:
The Amoy-dialect film industry emerged in the 1950s, producing cheap, b-grade films in Hong Kong for direct export to the theatres of Manila Chinatown, southern Taiwan and Singapore. Films made in Amoy dialect - a dialect of Chinese - reflected a particular period in the history of the Chinese diaspora, and have been little studied due to their ambiguous place within the wider realm of Chinese and East Asian film history. This book represents the first full length, critical study of the origin, significant rise and rapid decline of the Amoy-dialect film industry.

Rather than examining the industry for its own sake, however, this book focuses on its broader cultural, political and economic significance in the region. It questions many of the assumptions currently made about the ‘recentness’ of transnationalism in Chinese cultural production, particularly when addressing Chinese cinema in the Cold War years, as well as the prominence given to ‘the nation’ and ‘transnationalism’ in studies of Chinese cinemas and of the Chinese Diaspora. By examining a cinema that did not fit many of the scholarly models of ‘transnationalism’, that was not grounded in any particular national tradition of filmmaking and that was largely unconcerned with ‘nation-building’ in post-war Southeast Asia, this book challenges the ways in which the history of Chinese cinemas has been studied in the recent past.

About the Author:
Jeremy E. Taylor is a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, UK.

Press Reviews:
"Jeremy Taylor has written a delightful book about the Hokkien-language cinema industry during the 1950s and early 1960s... Taylor has searched extraordinarily widely to obtain relevant material. In addition to reading extensively in the scholarly literature, he has conducted interviews, obtained much information from a broad variety of newspapers and trade journals, and visited and mined many archives. The very readable text has 17 photographs illustrating many of the book’s themes... For those interested in Overseas Chinese, Taiwan or Chinese cinema, this book is a gem!" - J. Bruce Jacobs, Monash University; The China Journal, No. 67

See the publisher website: Routledge