Theorizing Ambivalence in Ang Lee's Transnational Cinema

Indpendent scholar Chih-Yun Chiang looks at a large subject-media and identity-through a narrow window. The window is two films made for international audiences by Chinese expatriate director Ang Lee: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lust, Caution. Through her attention to both the films themselves, and to how audiences responded to these films in online conversations across the Chinese diaspora, the author looks at different ways that different people construct and experience "Chineseness." She adroitly turns ideas like "authenticity" inside out, not through theoretical reasoning but through direct analysis. The author looks at the plots of films made in the US by a Chinese-raised American director creating Chinese/American stories for non-Chinese and Chinese audiences in the US and for Chinese and non-Chinese audiences in mainland China, Taiwan, and across Asia. For every cogent critique of an Ang Lee trope as not Chinese, or not Chinese enough, there is another voice, such as the mainland Chinese forum poster who writes that an expositional crash course in Chinese history is as needed for a generation denied history by the Cultural Revolution as for Americans ignorant of Chinese history. Does a Hollywood China validate a real China? Is there a difference? The book is written with far more care than most books on media, identity, or diasporic studies give to writing English prose that is understandable by non-specialist readers. It is a fine example of academic analysis of popular media; when the author argues that audiences experience a piece of work in certain ways, she consistently works from respectful attention to how audiences are reporting their own experiences in critical conversations. The central truth in this book resolves not as nation, state, history, politics, or culture, but as ambivalence itself, the live experience of simultaneously having a shared identity and not being able to define or be defined by its terms. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Chih-Yun Chiang received her MA and PhD in communication studies from the University of Denver. She has taught several culture and communication courses at the University of Denver and the College of Charleston. Dr. Chiang was the recipient of several awards, including the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation Fellowship. She has also published several articles including ?Diasporic Theorizing Paradigm on Cultural Identity? in Intercultural Communication Studies and ?Representing Chineseness in Globalized Cultural Production: Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine? in China Media Research.