Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology attempts to grasp media in the making. It delves into the underbelly of cinema in order to explore how images circulate and apparatus crystallize across different material formations. The indisciplinary experience of curators and projectionists provides a means to suspend traditional film studies and engage with the medium as it happens, as a continuing, self-differing mess. From contemporary art exhibitions to pirate screenings, research and practice come together in a vibrant form of media scholarship, built from the angle of cinema’s functionaries — a call to reinvent the medium from within.

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas---not least the idea of the power of visual art---across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, 1920s-mid-60s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, narrative and visual composition shifted in both cases toward acknowledging the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates and preoccupations are part of the story told here.

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region. This book brings together historians and linguists, who apply their respective analytic tools to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of the functions of multilingualism in identity-building in the period, and, from that, draw valuable lessons for understanding today's cosmopolitan societies.

Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, Italian, English, Spanish, and German: those are the eight languages in which Dutch Golden Age poet Constantijn Huygens (1596—1687) wrote his poetry and correspondence. He also knew a bit of Hebrew and Portuguese. Examining awide range of Huygens’s writings“including personal letters, state correspondence, and poetry“Christopher Joby explores how Huygens tested the boundaries of language with his virtuosity as a polyglot. From Huygens’s multilingual code switching to his writings on architecture, music, and natural science, this comprehensive account is a must-read for anyone interested in this Dutch statesman and man of letters.

This book challenges the museum enterprise in China as a state monopoly and considers it as a new cultural agency that has emerged in the early twenty-first century. Following a constructive and multi-perspectival approach, it discusses the roles of political and cultural-economic agents, museum intermediaries, and museum publics in the interlinked processes of regulation, cultural production and consumption, and the issues of identity and representation faced by the art museums in the Greater Pearl River Delta Region. It broadly traces the art museum from its origin as a tool of nationalism and adoption as a vehicle of modernization in both nationalist and early communist periods, until its role in the present, as it reflects the contested and alternative representations, diverse publics, and fissured identities of the post-economic reform period of China.

The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technology that makes these new engagements possible, asking questions like: How should we theorise the sensory experience of art and heritage? What does information technology mean for the authority and ownership of heritage?

What do we do when we listen? The act of engagement with music in everyday life may seem simple on the surface but participation, interpretation, circulation and cultural production in the digital age are more complex and entangled than ever before. It is especially so in Japan, with its vast multimedia idol and vocaloid industries. This unique ethnographic work at the intersection of cultural, media and music studies covers a wide spectrum of music-related activities embedded in the daily lives of two Japanese cohorts. The varied case studies, including teen idol groups and virtual idols, aid the detailed examination of the relation between music, generation, and society.

Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness—that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning, meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.

The Muslim Brotherhood is often represented in mainstream media as a theocratic organisation that preaches Qur’an-based violence and is out to grab power in the West. As this book shows, such representations are wrought with prejudice and oversimplification; the organisation is in reality much more dynamic and diverse. Its goals, ideology and influence have never been static and vary greatly amongst its descendants in both Europe and the Middle East. Joas Wagemakers introduces the reader to this fascinating organisation and the major ideological and historical developments that it has gone through since its emergence in 1928.

My Korea: Forty Years Without a Horsehair Hat is a cultural introduction to Korea, part memoir and part miscellany, which introduces traditional and contemporary culture through a series of essays, stories, anecdotes and poems. The book seeks to tell the reader all that he or she needs to know for a full and rewarding life in Korea or as a visitor passing through. Confucianism, Buddhism, relationships, everyday living, language and literature are comprehensively covered. Newcomers to Korea are provided with insights into daily life. They are told how to deal with people and the intricacies of honorific language, how to handle business dealings, how to be comfortable with social ranking, and how to react when they bump into the cultural wall.

This book challenges every common presumption that exists about the trafficking of women for the sex trade. It is a detailed account of an entire population of trafficked Albanian women whose varied experiences, including selling sex on the streets of France, clearly demonstrate how much the present discourse about trafficked women is misplaced and inadequate. The heterogeneity of the women involved and their relationships with various men is clearly presented as is the way women actively created a panoptical surveillance of themselves as a means of self-policing. There is no artificial divide between women who were deceived and abused and those who “choose” sex work; in fact the book clearly shows how peripheral involvement in sex work was to the real agenda of the women involved. Most of the women described in this book were not making economic decisions to escape desperate poverty nor were they the uneducated naïve entrapped into sexual slavery. The women’s success in transiting trafficking to achieve their own goals without the assistance of any outside agency is a testimony to their resilience and resolve.

It is 1942. Shanghai after Pearl Harbor. Newly-arrived Eiko Kishimoto, a twenty-year-old, London-educated Japanese housewife, settles into a privileged existence in the French Concession as a member of the community of the Occupying Power. Initially, her days are filled with high society lunches and dinners, race course and night club visits and open-air summer concerts, amidst an ebullient and remarkably cosmopolitan society that makes up Shanghai. But all is by no means what it seems. As war progresses, and Japan tightens its control within China, tensions mount, relationships unravel, and allegiances are questioned. It is not long before Eiko awakens to the meaning and implications of occupation for both her international friends and for Japanese civilians. Even her settled domestic life, with a growing family and close proximity to her beloved older sister, is threatened as Japan’s war efforts become more desperate and degenerate. Partly biographical – the author taking inspiration from her mother’s own war experiences in China – My Shanghai, 1942-1946 provides a fascinating insight into the Asia Pacific War as never told before, that is through the eyes of a young Japanese woman caught between her Christian values and loyalty to her country.

The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers indepth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be.

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions explores the traditions of two fascinating and contiguous cultures in north-western Europe. History regularly brought these two peoples into contact, most prominently with the Viking invasion of Ireland. In the famous Second Battle of Moytura, gods such as Lug, Balor, and the Dagda participated in the conflict that distinguished this invasion. Pseudohistory, which consists of both secular and ecclesiastical fictions, arose in this nexus of peoples and myth and spilled over into other contexts such as chronological annals. Scandinavian gods such as Odin, Balder, Thor, and Loki feature in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. This volume explores such written works alongside archaeological evidence from earlier periods through fresh approaches that challenge entrenched views.