Böcker av Sheng-mei Ma

The book explores how Chinese TV series and Asian Diaspora fiction are consumed, experienced, and adapted by and for audiences worldwide, particularly those of the Chinese diaspora.

A study of recent shifts in the depictions of Asian cultural stereotypes The Tao of S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century "e;Sinophobic"e; American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century "e;Sinophiliac"e; authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney's Mulan and a host of contemporary Chinese authors, to illuminate how cultural stereotypes have swung from fearmongering to an overcompensating exultation of everything Asian. Within this framework Ma employs the Taoist principle of yin and yang to illuminate how roles of the once-dominant American hegemony-the yang-and the once-declining Asian civilization-the yin-are now, in the twenty-first century, turned upside down as China rises to write its side of the story, particularly through the soft power of television and media streamed worldwide.A joint publication from the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press.

This book examines the paradox of China and the United States' literary and visual relationships, morphing between a happy duet and a contentious duel in fiction, film, poetry, comics, and opera from both sides of the Pacific.

Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves offthe 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are ';unglobalizable,' such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films' inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, including Ang Lee's ';white' films. The second half of the book analyzes Taiwan's popular culture in Western-style food and drink, conditions over living and dying, and English education, concluding with the source of Taiwan's anxietyChina. This book distinguishes itself from Taiwan scholarship in its stylistic crazy quilt of the scholarly interwoven with the personal, evidenced right from the outset in the poetic title ';The Last Isle,' coupled with the ';dissertating' subtitle. This approach intertwines the helix of reason and affect, scholarship and emotion. The Last Isle accomplishes a look at globalization from the bottom up, from a global Taiwan whose very existence is in doubt.