南池子

作者: Joseph R. Allen
出版社: University of Washington Press
副标题: City of Displacements
出版年: 2011-11-14
页数: 288
装帧: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780295991252




内容简介  · · · · · ·
This cultural study of public space examines the cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan, in rich descriptive prose. Contemplating a series of seemingly banal subjects--maps, public art, parks--Joseph Allen peels back layers of obscured history to reveal forces that caused cultural objects to be celebrated, despised, destroyed, or transformed as Taipei experienced successive regime changes and waves of displacement. In this thoughtful stroll through the city, we learn to look beyond surface ephemera, moving from the general to the particular to see socio-cultural phenomena in their historical and contemporary contexts.

作者简介  · · · · · ·
Joseph R. Allen is professor of Chinese literature and cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and author of In the Voice of Others: Chinese Music Bureau Poetry and translator of Forbidden Games and Video Poems: The Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch'ing.

南池子

Allen's book is a highly original history of Taipei told through analysis of place naming, maps, photographs, films, urban planning, architecture, parks, museums and memorials, and sculpture. These disparate forms are organized neatly around the theme of "displacement": the movement of objects, the renaming of streets, or the politically-driven reinscription of meaning onto existing memorial sites.

More than a history of the physical transformations of the city, Taipei traces the genealogy of urban space and architectural forms through Taiwan's multiple periods of colonizations and into the post-martial-law era, investigating their political and ideological implications. Using a variety of analytic methods—taken from geography, history, architecture, literature, film, semiotics, and ethnography—Allen shows the influences and forces that have converged in the specific construction of Taipei.

The focus on the physical constitution of the city is an inspired device to direct readers to questions one could ask about any global city: Who made it in this way and why? How does the past endure and how is it erased? How is it used and disputed? Beautifully written, Taipei is accessible to readers from a range of disciplines. It is the first book devoted to Taiwan to win the Levenson prize.

Selection Committee: Kirk Denton, Chair (Ohio State University); Timothy Cheek (University of British Columbia); Susan Blum (University of Notre Dame)

南池子

“2014 Joseph Levenson Book Prize: Pre-1900 Category”这一奖项同样也是颁发给了研究城市文化的另一本英文著作：

ANDREA GOLDMAN (UCLA): Opera and the City: The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770-1900 (Stanford University Press, 2012)

Andrea S. Goldman's Opera and the City, The Politics of Culture in Beijing, 1770–1900 lifts the curtain on Beijing's commercial theater in the 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the interactions of actors, theater-goers, playwrights, and the Qing court. Goldman's plot arises from a rich range of challenging sources, encompassing registers of beautiful "boy actresses," court regulations meant to control theater spaces and personnel, the scripts of individual plays, and programs of historical performances. The cast of characters includes marginal literati whose breathless accounts of cross-dressing beauties helped shore up their status as cultural arbiters, even as those same literati identified with actors as men of undervalued talent.

It stars an imperial court helpless to regulate the commercial theater until, ironically, its embrace of a particular opera genre proves to be an effective mechanism of ideological control. It shows performers and audiences shaping the meanings and messages of commercial opera by popularizing specific dramatic scenes. And in the exciting dénouement, we learn that our typical image of Qing culture may in fact be an artifact of the post-Taiping period, and not represent High Qing at all. Deeply researched, elegantly written, and analytically sophisticated, Opera and the City is a virtuoso performance par excellence.

Honorable Mention: Scott Cook (Grinnell C.); The Bamboo Texts of Guodian, A Study and Complete Translation (East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2012)

Selection Committee: Beverly Bossler, Chair (UC-Davis); Eugenio Menegon (Boston U.); Michael Nylan (UC-Berkeley)