Transnational Representations focuses on a neglected period in Taiwan film scholarship: the golden age of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw innovations in plot, theme and genre as directors highlighted the complexities of Taiwan’s position in the world. Combining a concise overview of Taiwan film history with analysis of representative Taiwan films, the book reveals the internal and external struggles Taiwan experienced in its search for global identity. This cross-disciplinary study adopts a transnational approach which presents Taiwan’s film industry as one that is intertwined with that of mainland China, challenging previous accounts that present the two industries as parallel yet separate. The book also offers productive comparisons between Taiwan films and contemporary films elsewhere representing the politics of migration, and between the antecedents of new cinema movements and Taiwan New Cinema of the 1980s. “James Wicks’s book offers a most nuanced, sensible, and timely account of the 1960s to 1970s Taiwan films in terms of plot, theme, language, and generic innovations. It zooms in on works by such prominent directors as Li Xing, Bai Jingrui, Song Cunshou, and others, highlighting local, regional, and transnational flows, while not losing sight of the complexities in the island-state’s identity and modernity formation processes.” —Ping-hui Liao, University of California, San Diego “Wicks’s engaging study forges a comparative approach to Taiwanese cinema that is enlivened and inspired by the possibility of close reading, historical research, and interviews. Most importantly, it draws attention to seminal films so rarely discussed in the English language.” —Brian Hu, artistic director of the San Diego Asian Film Festival

This open access edited collection examines representations of human trafficking in media ranging from British and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a documentary series, and questions the extent to which these portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. It tackles the problematic tendency to under-report particular types of victim and forms of trafficking, and seeks to explore both dominant and marginalised points of view. The authors take a cross-disciplinary approach, utilising analytical tools from across the humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, literary and media studies, and cultural criminology. It will appeal to students, academics and policy-makers with an interest in human trafficking and its depiction in the modern day.

This book investigates how the encounter between the U.S. filibuster expedition in 1855-1857 and Nicaraguans was imagined in both countries. The author examines transnational media and gives special emphasis to hitherto neglected publications like the bilingual newspaper El Nicaraguense. The study analyzes filibusters’ direct influence on their representations and how these form the basis for popular collective memories and academic discourses.

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

Museums of history and contemporary culture face many challenges in the modern age. One is how to react to processes of Europeanization and globalization, which require more cross-border cooperation and different ways of telling stories for visitors. This book investigates how museums exhibit Europe. Based on research in nearly 100 museums across the Continent and interviews with cultural policy makers and museum curators, it studies the growing transnational activities of state institutions, societal organizations, and people in the museum field such as attempts to Europeanize collection policy and collections as well as different strategies for making narratives more transnational like telling stories of European integration as shared history and discussing both inward and outward migration as a common experience and challenge. The book thus provides fascinating insights into a fast-changing museum landscape in Europe with wider implications for cultural policy and museums in other world regions.

Critics question the representativeness of NGOs, the democratic quality of their internal procedures, and their accountability to the wider public. This volume, written jointly by academics and practitioners, clarifies the issues at stake and controversially discusses proposals for reform.

This book examines how Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, has become a transnational symbol representing migration to Europe from the Global South. It analyses how three very different associations have used the name “Lampedusa” as a means of restoring a sense of subjectivity or agency to migrants themselves. Jacopo Colombini argues that the work of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti (Rome), the self-organised refugee group Lampedusa in Hamburg, and the Lampedusa-based Collettivo Askavusa offers an alternative to the stereotypical, often racially connoted, public discussion of migrant presence in Italy and Europe. He also demonstrates, however, that the marginalisation of migrant and refugee voices in the public discourse is also partially and unavoidably reproduced in the cultural projects that wish to restore their agency.

Increasingly, as the production, distribution and audience of films cross national boundaries, film scholars have begun to think in terms of ‘transnational’ rather than national cinema. This book is positioned within the emerging field of transnational cinema, and offers a groundbreaking study of the relationship between transnational cinema and ideology. The book focuses in particular on the complex ways in which religion, identity and cultural myths interact in specific cinematic representations of ideology. Author Milja Radovic approaches the selected films as national, regional products, and then moves on to comparative analysis and discussion of their transnational aspects. This book also addresses the question of whether transnationalism reinforces the nation or not; one of the possible answers to this question may be given through the exploration of the cinema of national states and its transnational aspects. Radovic illustrates the ways in which these issues, represented and framed by films, are transmitted beyond their nation-state borders and local ideologies in which they originated – and questions whether therefore one can have an understanding of transnational cinema as a platform for political dialogue.

Exhibiting Terror: Lindsay French

Aidan McGarry looks at the political participation and representation of the Romani community, one of the most disadvantaged and excluded minority in Europe.