Browsing by Author "Erdem, Chien Yang"

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Open Access
Breaking binaries : a critical approach to the fifth generation Chinese cinema
(2008) Erdem, Chien Yang
How to interpret the self-Orientalized representations in the Fifth Generation Chinese films remains an unresolved problem in cultural and film studies. This thesis underlines some of the major theoretical problems which have produced barriers for critical approaches to and understandings of the Fifth Generation phenomenon in Chinese cinema. By reconsidering the notion of power/knowledge in the Foucauldian sense, this work aims to challenge the assumed ontological relation between China and the West in rigid terms of binary oppositions and find an opening from this closure through which the complex and discursive interactions between the two can be critically examined. In this process of breaking the binaries, we are thus demanded to question the categories of culture, such as high vs. popular culture, art film vs. mass entertainment, etc., which take part in shaping our perceptual habits and interpretive politics.
Open Access
Ottomentality : neoliberal governance of culture and neo-ottoman management of diversity
(Routledge, 2017) Erdem, Chien Yang
This essay proposes an alternative concept–Ottomentality–in order to more adequately assess Turkey’s growing neo-Ottoman cultural ensemble. This concept is deployed here to underscore the convergence of neoliberal and neo-Ottoman rationalities and the discursive practices that are developed around them for governing culture and managing a diverse society. The essay contends that the convergence of these two rationalities has significantly transformed the state’s approach to culture as a way of governing the social, constituted a particular knowledge of multiculturalism, and a subject of citizenry increasingly subjected to exclusion and discipline for expressing critical views of this knowledge.