front cover of Cosmopolitan Minds
Cosmopolitan Minds
Literature, Emotion, and the Transnational Imagination
By Alexa Weik von Mossner
University of Texas Press, 2014

During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.

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front cover of Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination
Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination
Set Design in 1930s European Cinema
Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris, and Sarah Street
Amsterdam University Press, 2007
European cinema between World Wars I and II was renowned for its remarkable attention to detail and visual effects in set design. Visionary designers such as Vincent Korda and Alfred Junge extended their influence across national film industries in Paris, London, and Berlin, transforming the studio system into one of permeable artistic communities. For the first time, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination provides a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s.  Based on a wealth of drawings, film stills, and archival documents from the period, this volume illuminates the emerging significance of transnational artistic collaboration in light of developments in Britain, France, and Germany.  A comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of interwar cinematic production design, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination offers new insight into the period’s remarkable achievements and influence on subsequent generations.
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Hong Kong Connections
Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema
Meaghan Morris, Siu-Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
Since the 1960s, Hong Kong cinema has helped to shape one of the world’s most popular cultural genres: action cinema. Hong Kong action films have proved popular over the decades with audiences worldwide, and they have seized the imaginations of filmmakers working in many different cultural traditions and styles. How do we account for this appeal, which changes as it crosses national borders?

Hong Kong Connections brings leading film scholars together to explore the circulation of Hong Kong cinema in Japan, Korea, India, Australia, France, and the United States, as well as its links with Taiwan, Singapore, and the Chinese mainland. In the process, this collection examines diverse cultural contexts for action cinema’s popularity and the problems involved in the transnational study of globally popular forms, suggesting that in order to grasp the history of Hong Kong action cinema’s influence we need to bring out the differences as well as the links that constitute popularity.

Contributors. Nicole Brenez, Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, Dai Jinhua, David Desser, Laleen Jayamanne, Kim Soyoung, Siu Leung Li, Adrian Martin, S. V. Srinivas, Stephen Teo, Valentina Vitali, Paul Willemen, Rob Wilson, Wong Kin-yuen, Kinnia Yau Shuk-ting, Yung Sai-shing

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