The grassroots movements in nine places in East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s are empirically reconstructed in this volume. Asian history, especially radical history, is a subject often glossed over in the West. Seeking to remedy that, this book begins with an overview of late-us.htmlth-century history, the context within which these movements arose. The author relates Asian uprisings to predecessors in 1968 and shows their subsequent influence on the wave of uprisings that swept Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s. Then, by detailing the histories of uprisings in nine places—the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Thailand, and Indonesia—significant insight into major constituencies of change and the trajectories of these societies becomes visible. This book places the grassroots movements in a global context and analyzes them in light of major sociological theories.
Imagine watching an action film in a small-town cinema hall in Bangladesh, and in between the gun battles and fistfights, a short pornographic clip appears. This is known as a cut-piece, a strip of locally made celluloid pornography surreptitiously spliced into the reels of action films in Bangladesh. Exploring the shadowy world of these clips and their place in South Asian film culture, Lotte Hoek builds a rare, detailed portrait of the production, consumption, and cinematic pleasures of stray celluloid.
Hoek's innovative ethnography plots the making and reception of Mintu the Murderer (2005), a popular, Bangladeshi B-quality action movie and fascinating embodiment of the cut-piece phenomenon. She begins with the early scriptwriting phase and concludes with multiple screenings in remote Bangladeshi cinema halls, following the cut-pieces as they appear and disappear from the film, destabilizing its form, generating controversy, and titillating audiences. Hoek's work shines an unusual light on Bangladesh's state-owned film industry and popular practices of the obscene. She also reframes conceptual approaches to South Asian cinema and film culture, drawing on media anthropology to decode the cultural contradictions of Bangladesh since economic liberalization.
