front cover of The Sage in the Cathedral of Books
The Sage in the Cathedral of Books
The Distinguished Chinese American Library Professional Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee
Yang Yang
Ohio University Press, 2016

The biography of Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee, who was awarded the highly prestigious Melvil Dewey Medal by the American Library Association in 2015, will be welcomed by readers interested in knowing not only more about Lee’s personal achievements and contributions in librarianship but also about the rapid changes in the library profession in general. The biography, written by Ms. Yang Yang of China Central Television in Beijing, was first published in Chinese in China in 2011. It was republished in Taiwan with added information in 2014. This English edition, translated by Dr. Ying Zhang of the Universityof California in Irvine, was updated by Lee.

Throughout his childhood and youth, Lee experienced tremendous hardship during the brutal Sino-Japanese War and then the Chinese civil war, described in the first three chapters. After arriving in the United States as a graduate student from Taiwan in 1957, he struggled to realize the American dream by studying hard and working diligently in the field of librarianship for nearly half a century.

The biography explores Lee’s career at major academic libraries, beginning at the University of Pittsburgh to his retirement from Ohio University, including his seven years of library directorship at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Agency for International Development. After his first retirement, Lee was invited by OCLC to become a Visiting Distinguished Scholar. From there he was appointed Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress and retired for the second time in 2008.

The biography also highlights Lee’s contributions in international librarianship, especially in the promotion of library cooperation between the United States and China.

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front cover of Screening China
Screening China
Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Zhang Yingjin
University of Michigan Press, 2002
When Chinese films are screened in the West, viewers often prize, debate, and critique the “Chineseness” presented therein. Critics, scholars, and cultural theorists, too, latch onto the ethnic and cultural markers in Chinese film, often applying their theories as if they were universally applicable and even independent of history. They study only a small number of films from a large body of available works, often with a unidirectional Eurocentric bias. As a result, Chinese filmmakers are caught between the Western consumer and critical demand for ethnic and cultural images and the local restrictions of economics and politics.
Screening China follows filmmakers’ efforts to reconfigure China and position their work between the global and the local. In Part I, Yingjin Zhang catalogs the lenses Western film critics have used to break down, neatly package, and closely scrutinize China. One of the chief examples is the narrative of Communist Party censorship in which the regime notoriously represses artists and repeatedly violates human rights. In Part II of Screening China, Zhang narrates how New Chinese Cinema struggled to break free of the ethnic and cultural representation sought by Western audiences, introducing readers to the numerous Chinese filmmakers who have used the space opened up by New Chinese Cinema to present China in all its social, historical, political, ethnic, cultural, and economic facets.
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