School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    From diplomacy to diffusion: the Macartney mission and its impact on the understanding of Chinese art, aesthetics, and culture in Great Britain, 1793-1859
    Blakley, Kara Lindsey ( 2018)
    Recent art historical scholarship has begun to expand with studies in cross-cultural convergences and transferences garnering newfound attention. This dissertation, through a series of close readings, examines how the deterioration in the relationship between China and Britain manifests in art. In particular, I am concerned with the corollary concepts of depiction and diffusion: that is, how do British artists depict China and the Chinese, and then, how do these depictions diffuse into British visual and material culture more broadly? The primary temporal focus begins with the Macartney diplomatic embassy of 1793, and ends with Victoria’s accession. Through a semiotic interpretation, I demonstrate that the subtle changes in the British visual depiction of recurring Chinese signs (such as the pagoda or ladies of rank) reveal concomitant shifts in attitudes towards China. The concepts of depiction and diffusion comprise the first and second halves, respectively. Chapter Two examines the visual templates that the Jesuit missionaries based at the Beijing court created. Chapters Three and Four center on the imagery of William Alexander, who served as junior artist to the Macartney mission. His two illustrated travelogues (published 1805 and 1814) synthesized signifiers of China that had circulated in Britain for over a century, but his reinterpretation, in addition to his anthropological approach, anticipate an imperialistic turn. His images—which, notably, departed from the the fantastical chinoiserie which predated them— purported to demonstrate to armchair-travelers the way China ‘looked,’ but it is this very claim to authenticity which requires that the images be read anew through a postcolonial lens. Alexander’s images inform the work of Thomas Allom, who created entirely new Chinese scenes in the wake of the Opium Wars; this is taken up in Chapter Five. Chapters Six and Seven seeks to understand the diffusion of Chinese imagery in Britain, and what the cultural signification of that diffusion is. Chapter Six discusses the role of the anglo- chinois garden in eighteenth-century Britain. It also examines the role that William Chambers played in popularizing Chinese motifs, and how his legacy and contribution to an emerging Romantic aesthetic has been obscured in previous literature. Chapter Seven details the interior design scheme of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (decorated 1802-1823). In the Music Room, Alexander’s documentary imagery has been transformed into decorative spectacle, and pagodas were miniaturized, trivialized, and brought inside: in this regard, Britain sought to possess China by proxy. By interpreting Britain’s Chinese imagery through a semiotic framework, I examine how artists and audiences negotiated increasing contact with China. Evocations of familiar signs belie a deteriorating relationship, which was hastened by Britain’s rapid industrialization and the unabating desire for Chinese goods. As art history embarks on an intercultural turn, connections between China and Britain in the early modern, proto-global world must be included in this field. This dissertation serves as one such point of departure.
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    Somewhere, between 'in' and 'out': locating Jia and internet in Baling-jiulinghou Chinese gay subjectivities
    Yi, Keren ( 2016)
    Informed by face-to-face interviews with over twenty young gay men during a 2013 field trip to five cities across Mainland China, this research thesis critically examines the everyday articulations of their sexual subjectivities both in the space of family and in cyberspace. By contemplating the state of existence experienced by these young men—specifically, their management of parent-child relationships and their utilization of Internet and geo-locative social media in negotiating their sexual identities—this thesis seeks to provide a framework to theorize broader socio-cultural specificities lived by this generation of urban Chinese gay men. A central argument of this dissertation is that contemporary Chinese gay subjectivities are not only defined by constant negotiations between ‘closetedness’ and ‘outness’, they are also paradoxically constituted vis-à-vis rapid, ongoing, socio-cultural shifts experienced by the Chinese baling- jiulinghou generation. Focusing on family and filiality, as well as the rise of geo-locative media, this thesis explores how these shifting circumstances are generating conflicting sets of expectations for young Chinese gay men, and constructing them as queer subjects of contradictions and incoherencies.
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    Power and counter-power in a global information age: public relations and new media technologies in China
    SIMA, YANGZI ( 2010)
    Through interdisciplinary engagement with political-economic analyses of new media, the public sphere, public relations and environmental communication, this thesis examines the social implications of the Internet for the practice of public relations (PR) in China in both corporate and activist settings. The notion of power is introduced to posit the research within the broader theoretical framework of power-making in the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) by linking the discussion to critical perspectives on cyberpower (Hindman, 2009; Jordan, 1999), technocapitalism (Mosco, 2009; Schiller, 1999, 2007) and technostruggle (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Juris, 2004; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Kellner, 2004). Triangulating traditional and virtual ethnographic methods, fieldwork was conducted at the PR and Communications Department of General Electric Company (GE) China and a Chinese grassroots environmental NGO (ENGO) called the Global Village of Beijing (GVB). Development in Internet technologies, especially the rise of the so-called Web 2.0 applications, has renewed optimism within the PR industry and scholarship about the enhancement of interactivity, which is best embodied by the concept of two-way symmetrical dialogue proposed by James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt (1984). The Internet has also been hailed as a ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) that is capable of bridging the resource gap for activist organisations. Such generalisations lean towards technological-determinism and do not recognise the complex and organic relationship between technology use and its social context. The study offers ‘thick’ descriptions that both document the contextualised incorporation of Internet technologies into daily PR work and connect it with critical theory. It is found that Internet-based technologies are only capable of re-configuring the power balance to a limited degree. The corporate example shows that the interactive and dialogic potential of the Net has not been fully exploited, and most network strategies remain online extensions of one-way and two-way asymmetric PR models. The ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) thesis also proves weak given the resource shortage suffered by activists in constructing their online presence, which is exacerbated by the increasing commodification of information and attention in cyberspace that further disadvantages the resource-short. Nevertheless, it is also found that Internet technologies can assist activists in their self-representation, network building, information brokering, agenda setting, public mobilisation and construction of discourse communities. This demonstrates the counter information flow online in which civil society actors adopt the same network strategies to promote counter ideologies. To a certain extent, the activists’ online activities have contributed to the formation of an incipient and (electronically) mediated counter public sphere in China – a ‘green’ public sphere (Torgerson, 1999; Yang and Calhoun, 2007) that fosters a counter discourse, or ‘greenspeak’ (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäuser, 1999), to counterbalance fast-tracked neoliberal globalisation. The issues that hamper this process are also highlighted, including lingering resource shortage, the fragmentation of online discourse communities, and the marginalisation and ‘caging’ of environmental discourses. The study concludes that neither public relations nor the Internet can be reduced to simple generalisations. Both are dialectical concepts that reflect power contestations. The Internet is not a panacea that can transform public relations overnight and make it two-way symmetrical. It remains to be seen if interaction and dialogue will further enter the (corporate) PR psyche, although little optimism exists given the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between system organisations and discourse ethics. It would be equally mistaken to label online public relations as simply extending the discursive and symbolic power of the powerful, in light of the innovative online public relations strategies adopted by activists and NGOs to set agendas and communicate with their publics.