Kenneth Chan

This book describes how notions of Chinese identity, culture, and popular film genres have been reinvented and repackaged by major U.S. studios, spurring a surge in Chinese visibility in Hollywood.

The Global Chinese Presence in Transnational Cinemas

Remade in Hollywood

David Scott Diffrient

This wide-ranging, historically grounded exploration of motion picture remakes produced in East Asia brings together original contributions from experts in Chinese, Hong Kong, Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese cinemas and puts forth new ways of thinking about the remaking process as both a critically underappreciated form of artistic expression and an economically motivated industrial practice. Exploring everything from ethnic Korean filmmaker Lee Sang-il's Unforgiven (2013), a Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood's Western of the same title, to Stephen Chow's The Mermaid (2016), a Chinese slapstick reimagining of Walt Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989) and Hans Christian Andersen's 1837 fairy tale, East Asian Film Remakes contributes to a better understanding of cinematic remaking across the region and offers vital alternatives to the Eurocentric and Hollywood-focused approaches that have thus far dominated the field.

East Asian Film Remakes

Shakespeare's Hamlet contains a profound spiritual message for mankind that has been largely unrecognized for centuries. The meaning of Hamlet so perplexed critics over the last four hundred years that many finally concluded, after immense struggle, that the play lacks a binding philosophy. Nothing, in fact, is more wrong. Quintessence of Dust now explains how Shakespeare meticulously crafted every scene to convey, through our emotional involvement in the drama, a central spiritual message. The book also explains by a single coherent theme practically every aspect of the play that has puzzled critics for centuries. It demonstrates that Hamlet is nothing short of an artistic miracle, reflected both in its poetic brilliance and in its profound meaning.

The Mystical Meaning of Hamlet

Quintessence of Dust

Bugis Street was famous (or notorious) for being a haunt of transgender prostitution in the early decades of postcolonial Singapore. Since then the site has been a source of touristic obsession and local cultural anxiety. In his 1995 film Bugis Street, director Yonfan brings the short lane back to vivid cinematic life. By focusing on the film’s representations of queer sexualities and transgender experience, this book contends that the under-appreciated Bugis Street is a significant instance of queer transnational cinema. The film’s playful yet nuanced articulations of queer embodiment, spatiality, and temporality provide an unexpected intervention in the public discourses on LGBT politics, activism, and cultures in Singapore today. This book’s arrival at a much more complicated and contradictory picture of the discursive Bugis Street, through the examination of Yonfan’s film and a range of other cultural and literary texts, adds a new critical dimension to the ongoing historical, geographical, sociological, ethnographic, and artistic analyses of this controversial space.

Kenneth Chan

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