The Tyranny of the Serial: Popular Geopolitics,the Nation,and Comic Book Discourse

Abstract: This paper seeks to theorize the structuring of geopolitical worldviews and attitudes by the comic book medium and by serial popular culture more broadly. Evidence of the use of comic books to promote specific discourses by geopolitical actors is presented, and the conventions that govern the limits of comic book narration are outlined. Among the conventions of production discussed are the role of “continuity” as a structuring force and the serial nature of most comic books. The impact of these conventions is viewed through an examination of Watchmen and Captain America comic books. Both series revolve around issues of political legitimacy and the structuring of geopolitical space, but do so in different ways. This leads to insight connecting seriality with the concept of the nation itself. Finally, a theorization of the limits to comic book and other serialized discourse is outlined, and its ultimately conservative political outcome is described as endemic to the genre.     

《美国华人社会的变迁》评介

19世纪中叶,不少华人满怀淘金的梦想,飘洋过海,到夏威夷的农庄和美国西部的矿山当契约劳工,后来又到美国西部修建铁路.铁路修成后,等待他们的却是美国历史上惟一的一部歧视少数民族的法令 --《排华法令》.     

Conceptualising Youth Culture in Postwar France

The article discusses the meanings of youth culture, and particularly music, in contemporary France, in the light of the Ministry of Culture's adoption a quarter of a century ago of a sympathetic discourse towards it. Contrasting similarly sympathetic French sociological analyses with the seminal work undertaken in Anglophone cultural studies on subcultures, it argues that the variable nomenclature of youth culture in French public discourse is founded on two fundamental ways of conceptualising youth culture, to which the work of Pierre Mayol draws attention. While la culture des jeunes, denoting the leisure practices of 15- to 24-year-olds, connotes a culture existing in an ephemeral, ghettoised present, la culture jeune has undergone the process that Bourdieu calls legitimation. The article concludes by asking whether these dual meanings of youth culture may ultimately be mapped on to the republican opposition between particularism and universalism.     

泰山论剑:文献传统的口头性解读--民间文化青年论坛第三届会议学术综述

2005年8月2日到8月5日,民间文化青年论坛第三届会议暨泰山非物质文化遗产研讨会在五岳之首的泰山召开。来自大陆和台严22所高校和科研单位以及美国、日本研究中国民间文化的40余位中青年学者出席了研讨会。刘魁立、刘铁梁、车锡伦等著名学者到会指导。