Description
Book SynopsisHow does China project its image in the world? Why and how has the world come to form certain impressions of the Chinese and their way of life? These are issues that preoccupy Chinese citizens in the globalizing 21st century as they travel overseas, riding on the capacity of the country’s newly acquired economic power. In Visualizing China, the authors join forces to launch a broader inquiry aimed at a synergistic understanding of the larger story of visuality in modern China. The essays cluster around several nodal points including photographs, advertising, posters and movies, spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s, and devote special attention to modern Chinese practices in the visualization of things Chinese.
Table of ContentsIntroduction. China Visualised: What Stories do Pictures Tell? - Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh List of Illustrations PART I THE CHINA PHOTOGRAPHS: THREE READINGS: The Lives and Deaths of Photographs in Early Treaty Port China - Robert Bickers Obscene Vignettes of Truth. Construing Photographs of Chinese Executions as Historical Documents - Jérôme Bourgon Street Culture, Visual Fragments and Everyday Life: Narrating Peddlers in Shanghai Modern - Christian Henriot PART II THE VISIBILITy OF CHINESE WOMEN AND HOME: Portraits of Republican Ladies: Materiality and Representation in Early Twentieth Century Chinese Photographs - Joan Judge Images of Houses, Houses of Images: Some Preliminary Thoughts on a Socio-Cultural History of Urban Dwellings in Pre-1940s Canton - Virgil K.Y. Ho PART III ADVERTISING AND PROPAGANDA: THE VISUAL IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATIONS: From Viewing to Reading: The Evolution of Visual Advertising in Late Imperial China - Jen-Shu Wu and Ling-Ling Lien Imagined Communities Divided: Reading Visual Regimes in Shanghai’s Newspaper Advertising (1860s–1910s) - Barbara Mittler Contextualising (Propaganda) Posters - Stefan Landsberger The Dialectics of Mao’s Images: Monumentalism, Circulation and Power Effects - Pang Laikwan PART IV MOVING PICTURES: Single Women and the Men in their Lives: Zhang Ailing and Post-War Visual Images of the Big Metropolis - Paul Pickowicz and Yap Soo Ei An Ordinary Shanghai Woman in an Extraordinary Time: A View from Post-War Popular Cinema - Fu Poshek Index Plate section
