MCLC: Fiery Cinema

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Fiery Cinema
Dear members of the MCLC community,
I am happy to announce the publication of my new book Fiery Cinema, The Emergence of An Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press), now available in the US and continental Europe, in both paperback and hardback.  I hope you will find this book of interest. Please the blurb and table of contents below.
best wishes,
Weihong Bao <whjbao at gmail.com>
What was cinema in modern China? It was, this book tells us, a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions.
Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity.
Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.
Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China
Introduction
Part I. Resonance
1. Fiery Action: Toward an Aesthetics of New Heroism
2. A Culture of Resonance: Hypnotism, Wireless Cinema, and the Invention of Intermedial Spectatorship
Part II. Transparency
3. Dances of Fire: Mediating Affective Immediacy
4. Transparent Shanghai: Cinema, Architecture, and a Left-Wing Culture of Glass
Part III. Agitation
5. “A Vibrating Art in the Air”: The Infinite Cinema and the Media Ensemble of Propaganda
6. Baptism by Fire: Atmospheric War, Agitation, and a Tale of Three Cities
Acknowledgments
Notes
Filmography
Index
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 7, 2015
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