Constructing Pan-Chinese Cultures:
Globalism and the Shaw Brothers' Cinema

October 2-4, 2003
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Shaw Brothers Studio dominated the film culture and entertainment
business      in the transnational Pan-Chinese world between the
1950s and 1980s (it retains      control over the largest television
network in Asia today).  As film director and University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign alumnus Ang Lee discusses in a recent New York Times
interview, the shaping influences on his successful      Pan-Chinese
film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are the numerous Shaw Brothers's
historical costume drama and martial arts films he watched (and
memorized) as he was growing up in Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s.

Focusing on the globalization of the Shaw Brothers cinema from the
1950s to      1980s, this conference aims to historicize the
development of transnational      Pan-Chinese cultures and shed new
light on the complex history and politics      of Chinese cinemas as
part of the global Chinese diapsoric social and economic
networks as well as a global popular culture contributing to the
transformation      of social systems and values, gender
relationships, and identity formation      in the Asia-Pacific as
well as to the growth of racial consciousness and ethnic
politics in North America.  The importance of the Shaw Brothers
cinema in the global development of Pan-Chinese film cultures and
Chinese diaspora cannot be overestimated.

Free and open to the public

For more information:

http://www.history.uiuc.edu/shawbrothers/index.html
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Sarah Projansky
Associate Professor
Gender and Women's Studies Program
Unit for Cinema Studies
University of Illinois
911 S. Sixth Street
Champaign, IL  61820
(217) 333-2990 (office)
(217) 333-0151 (fax)

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu