Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies, 28)

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s __Romancing Human Rights__ maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. __Romancing Human Rights__ demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes __Romancing Human Rights__ a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

In this milestone work, prominent China film scholar Yingjin Zhang proposes "polylocality" as a new conceptual framework for investigating the shifting spaces of contemporary Chinese cinema in the age of globalization. Questioning the national cinema paradigm, Zhang calls for comparative studies of underdeveloped areas beyond the imperative of transnationalism.

The book begins by addressing theories and practices related to space, place, and polylocality in contemporary China before focusing on the space of scholarship and urging scholars to move beyond the current paradigm and explore transnational and comparative film studies. This is followed by a chapter that concentrates on the space of production and surveys the changing landscape of postsocialist filmmaking and the transformation of China’s urban generation of directors. Next is an examination of the space of polylocality and the cinematic mappings of Beijing and a persistent "reel" contact with polylocality in hinterland China. In the fifth chapter Zhang explores the space of subjectivity in independent film and video and contextualizes experiments by young directors with various documentary styles. Chapter 6 calls attention to the space of performance and addresses issues of media and mediation by way of two kinds of playing: the first with documentary as troubling information, the second with piracy as creative intervention. The concluding chapter offers an overview of Chinese cinema in the new century and provides production and reception statistics.

Combining inspired critical insights, original observations, and new information, Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China is a significant work on current Chinese film and a must-read for film scholars and anyone seriously interested in cinema more generally or contemporary Chinese culture.

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the over determination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the 'high status' of Southeast Asian women. Critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho maps 'Burmese women' as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first "Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being"--Jacket.