Cinema has long played a major role in the formation of community among marginalized groups, and this book details that process for gay men in Sydney, Australia from the 1950s to the present. Scott McKinnon builds the book from a variety of sources, including film reviews, media reports, personal memoirs, oral histories, and a striking range of films, all deployed to answer the question of understanding cinema-going as a moment of connection to community and identity—how the experience of seeing these films and being part of an audience helped to build a community among the gay men of Sydney in the period.
 

In This Issue

Special Issue Editors: Kenneth Paul Tan & Dorothy Lau

Letter from the Editor - YING ZHU

Cold War and New Cold War Narratives: Special Issue Editor’s Introduction - KENNETH PAUL TAN

Research Articles

Notes on Cold War Historiography - LOUIS MENAND

Tales from the Hot Cold War - MARTHA BAYLES

Bomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set - ILONA JURKONYTĖ

Das unsichtbare Visier—A 1970s Cold War Intelligence TV Series as a Fantasy of International and Intranational Empowerment; or, How East Germany Saved the World and West Germans Too - TARIK CYRIL AMAR

To Whom Have We Been Talking? Naeem Mohaiemen’s Fabulation of a People-to-Come - NOIT BANAI

The Man without a Country: British Imperial Nostalgia in Ferry to Hong Kong (1959) - KENNY K. K. NG

Imagining Cooperation: Cold War Aesthetics for a Hot Planet - MARINA KANETI

Book Reviews

Through Space and Time - Review of The Odyssey of Communism: Visual Narratives, Memory and Culture edited by Michaela Praisler and Oana-Celia Gheorghiu, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021 - ISABEL GALWEY

Review of Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market by Ying Zhu, New Press, 2022 - YONGLI LI

The Cautionary Tale of Painting War Remembrance in China as a New Nationalism - Review of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism by Rana Mitter, Belknap Press, 2020 - FUWEI ZUO

Tracking American Political Currents - Review of White Identity Politics by Ashley Jardina, Cambridge University Press, 2019, and Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class by Reece Peck, Cambridge University Press, 2019 - DAVID GURNEY

Special Issue 3.1 – East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming Services (Summer 2023)
Special Issue Editors Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu

IN THIS ISSUE

Tze-lan Sang, Lina Qu, and Ying Zhu - East Asian Serial Dramas in the Era of Global Streaming Services: Special Issue Editors’ Introduction

Research Articles
Ying Zhu - The Therapeutic and the Transgressive: Chinese Fansub Straddling between Hollywood IP Laws and Chinese State Censorship
David Humphrey - Japanese Dramas and the Streaming Success Story that Wasn’t: How Industry Practices and IP Shape Japan’s Access to Global Streaming    
Yucong Hao - Transmedia Adaptation, Sonic Affect, and Multisensory Participation in Contemporary Chinese Danmei Radio Drama
Eunice Ying Ci Lim - The Nostalgic Negotiation of Post-TV Legibility in Mom, Don’t Do That!    
Winnie Yanjing Wu - How Pachinko Mirrors Migrant Life: Rethinking the Temporal, Spatial, and Linguistic Dimensions of Migration

Drama Reviews
Mei Mingxue Nan - Squid Game: The Hall of Screens in the Age of Platform Cosmopolitanism
Shuwen Yang - Review of Light the Night

Short Essay
Sheng-mei Ma - Three Bad Kids, One Loving Killer: Red China Noir in Blakean Symmetry

Special Issue Editor: Haiqing Yu

Haiqing Yu. COVID-19, Satirical Activism, and Chinese Youth Culture: An Introduction

Research Articles
Ying Zhu and Junqi Peng.  From Diaosi to Sang to Tangping: The Chinese DST Youth Subculture Online
Shaohua Guo. Moments of "Madness": Cynicism in Times of COVID
Howard Choy. Laughter in the Time of Coronavirus: Epidemic Humor and Satire in Chinese Women's Digital Diaries
Shaoyu Tang. Political In Between: Streaming Stand-Up Comedy and Feminist Reckoning in Contemporary Mainland China
Jingxue Zhang and Charlie Yi Zhang. The Power of Citation: Feminist Counter-Appropriation of State Discourses in Post-Reform China

Book Reviews
Ethan Tussey. Revised Research Methodology for the Age of Media Industries Speculation - Review of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Embedded Creator Industries by John Thornton Caldwell, University of California Press, 2023
Michael Keane. Precarious Creativity and the State in New Era China - Review of Chinese Creator Economies: Labor and Bilateral Creative Workers by Jian Lin, New York University Press, 2023

Governing Visions of the Real traces the emergence, development, and techniques of Griersonian documentary—named for pioneering Scottish filmmaker John Grierson—in New Zealand throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Paying close attention to the productions of the National Film Unit in the 1940s and ’50s, Lars Weckbecker follows the shifting practices and governmentality of documentary’s “visions of the real” as New Zealand and its population—particularly workers and its indigenous population—came to be envisioned through NFU film for an ensemble of political, pedagogic, and propagandistic purposes.

Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more
 
While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting.
 
It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
 
The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.