Ray Wu's Blog

The chief taxonomic difficulty that haunts film genre study is its dependence on circular reasoning. Discussions of genre, as Robert Stam suggests, are inevitably characterized by a “tautological quality.” We hardly need reminding that this kind of debate has not raged around the other Hollywood genres (musicals, biopics, melodramas, etc.), and the reason is that […]

This last point is proved by Aristotle, who says with elegant precision: “the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master’ (Politics 1254’20).” On the Right to Debate Colonial Justice “When we hear subsequently of bloody massacres and of […]

In Guarnan Poma’s estimation, the priests ultimately suffer in comparison even with the integrity and good examples of pre-Hispanic Andean religious ministers who, in his view, “were Christians in everything but their idolatry.” Guaman Poma writes, the Indian women become “notorious whores,” and a Mestizo population multiplies while the number of native Andeans diminishes. In […]

For example, pornography is today more often deemed excessive for its violence than for its sex, while horror films are excessive in their displacement of sex onto violence. I suggest, however, that the film genres that have had especially low cultural status—which have seemed to exist as ex- cesses to the system of even the popular […]

“Asia Extreme” is the first label created to specifically distribute East Asian film titles by London-based Tartan Films, which operated as Metro-Tartan Distribution between 1992 and 2003, before reverting back to the name Tartan Films. Starting off as a cult phenomenon, targeting the cult “fan-boys” but soon incorporating the art- house audiences (or world cinema […]

The sacralization of culture was an invented phenomenon. There was a time when opera could exist simultaneously as a popular and an elite art form, a time when American audiences might hear a soliloquy from Hamlet and a popular song in the course of one evening’s entertainment at a local venue. As certain cultural products […]

Published posthumously (5 years) Medici family, a banking dynasty controlling Florence from 1434 to 1737 Political realism: driven by power, self-interest Machiavelli: focussed on how politics really work, not how it should work one can never escape a war, can only postpone to the enemy’s advantage. States are divided into: hereditary, new principalities, mixed principalities, […]

Born in Tunis, 1332, born into high class, family escaped Spain after the Reconquista. Send as an emissary and negotiator from Cairo to meet Timur. History, social sciences, as opposed to the chronicles of the royalty  

Similarity to Dante’s Inferno, the guidance and foretelling Lady Reason, Rectitude, and Justice Women operate their city in their own way. Rumour as a way of seeing social intelligence. Upholding women’s knowledge.

Islam: birthed during the time of tribal division Qur’an: 114 Surahs, meant to be heard just as much as it is meant to be read One text shaping entire cultures God appears in Muhammad’s life multiple times Faith and morality (Meccan Surahs) Law and community (Medinan Surahs)