Michael Hoover

Hong Kong in New York: Global connections, national identity, and filmic representations

According to self-proclaimed “border artist” Guillermo Gomez-Pena, “in one way or another we are all, or will be immigrants.” But what does it mean to cross a border that Gomez-Pena calls a “multiple metaphor of death, encounter, fortune, insanity, and transmutation” and relocate? While some diasporic narratives emphasize the sacrifice embodied in migration, others focus on subjects struggling against adversity and violation by affirming their cultural hybridity and changing social positions. Nevertheless, theorists and writers tend to rely upon bipolar formulations (“us vs. them”) that lessen comprehension of the emigrant experience in terms of global relations of power and the world capitalist system. Migrations of Asians as cheap labor, displacement of refugees, and the exile of large groups historically developed different diasporas around the world. Recently, affluent Chinese (principally from Hong Kong and Taiwan) possessing what anthropologist Aihwa Ong calls “flexible citizenship” have been able to shuttle back and forth between “home” and enclave without holding allegiance to or identifying with either. The mobility of this stratum serves to underscore the immobility of the less privileged “stuck” in whatever place they find themselves. Both sets of circumstances, however, exacerbate the general sense of dislocation disrupting affective values such as stability, bonding, and belonging. “Border crosser” films made by Hong Kong directors such as Cheung Yuen-ting (An Autumns Tale), Stanley Kwan (Full Moon in New York), Clara Law (Farewell China), Peter Chan (Comrades, Almost a Love Story) and Evan Chan (Crossings) in the 1980s and 1990s use New York City as a backdrop for telling immigrant/migrant stories. These filmmakers variously present the diasporic experience as surmountable obstacles leading to acclimation; as loneliness and struggle as well as friendship and intimacy; and as difficult adjustments in conflict with tradition. In the process, they either explicitly or implicitly negotiate Hong Kongs pre-1997 predicament and the sense of anxiety created in its wake.

Why democracy is oppositional

role of the protector of human rights that are violated by the cartels in the South. Reality is of course more complex. Drawing on a slew of artistic and journalistic texts, Shapiro shows that the quotidian (and horrifying) experience of Mexicans often contradict the official wisdom of such policies. Unfortunately, this analysis is weighed down by its radical sweep—a surfeit of authors and texts. one feels this chapter would be easier to follow were he to excise two or three texts. War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice is an effective though not always elegant book. after several extended analyses of biopolitics, one finally comes to understand more clearly just what it is Shapiro aims to achieve. Despite the demands on the reader, Shapiro’s book may be useful as a primer for a few key concepts of critical thought, including the gaze, biopolitics, ontologies and apparatuses, and dispositifs. Most importantly, Shapiro provides a compelling if not always clean examination of the disjunctures between the global justice regime with its emphases on human rights and retributive justice and the actual practices of the actors mobilized within this apparatus. Moreover, Shapiro’s methodological strategy exemplifies how we might uncover sites and intersections sanctioned by justice dispositifs that engender or perpetuate war crimes and atrocities. Shapiro fills this text with intriguing and occasionally difficult anecdotes, episodes, texts, and theories with which to investigate taken-for-granted universals. Not all of these land, but if the reader sticks to it the book repays the efforts.

Tanner ‘88 and the television of politics

Abstract Using a 1988 Home Box Office (HBO) series as a point of departure this paper examines the state of mass‐mediated politics. Examples from Tanner ‘88 reveal unmistakable signs of contemporary electoral campaigns ‐ stage management, monitored public opinion, and mythinformation. Pseudo‐events replace actual political circumstances to create politically useful images. The consciousness industry, in creating almost universal commodification, has fused propaganda and advertising in the selling of products and politics. Emphasis on spectacle and happening, immediate delivery, and manipulation of demand represent important changes in the way that capitalism and democracy work. A new mode of information in which social relations are mediated by electronic communication systems is being created. But saturation coverage in the media has not created a better‐informed, more active electorate. Rather, it has reduced the political process to a level of mindless slogans, trivial issues, and meaningless simulations.