Search Results (4)

The film Black Panther (2018) has been the subject of extensive discussion, particularly within the context of representational politics in contemporary Hollywood cinema. This critical scoping review maps how academic literature interprets the film‘s treatment of colonial, racial, cultural, gender, and disability-related stereotypes and examines how these interpretations are shaped by epistemic context. A systematic search and screening process yielded 52 publications from 2018 to 2024 that were analyzed with qualitative content analysis and descriptive mapping. The review indicates that scholarly response to the film is defined by structured ambivalence. While scholarship predominantly frames Black Panther as challenging colonial and racial stereotypes, it also points to inconsistent representations and reinforced stereotyping, particularly with regard to cultural homogenization, exceptionalism, and patriarchal governance. Interpretive stances vary systematically across epistemic positions. Scholarship based in Africa emphasizes counter-stereotypical readings, whereas scholarship from the United States, accounting for half of the reviewed contributions, displays greater interpretive diversity, including more critical and ambivalent positions. These findings suggest that Black Panther does not function as a counter-stereotypical text. Rather, it is a site where representational politics in global blockbuster cinema, industry constraints, and epistemic authority intersect, extending the soft-power dynamics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into academic knowledge production. Full article

Chinese state-endorsed films have transformed in the past decade. These films make up the “new mainstream”, a genre defined by its ability to match strides with Hollywood commercial cinema. But, what exactly comprises Hollywood’s impact on official Chinese media? How does it manifest onscreen? Exploring the relationship between state-endorsed blockbusters and Hollywood, this article analyzes a pioneer of the “new mainstream”, Wolf Warrior II (2017). This film stands out as the inaugural collaboration between Chinese media conglomerates and Marvel Cinematic Universe directors. From this collaboration emerges the film’s protagonist, Leng Feng, an ex-soldier who saves civilians from rebel forces in Africa. As Leng enacts justice at home and abroad, however, affective portrayals of his feats foreground ambiguity over coherence and unresolvable impulses over a singular agendum. These melodramatic sites of contradiction, I argue, culminate in the film’s own “global superhero vernacular”. Such a vernacular aligns with transnationally circulating serial franchise logics, pushing the film’s connection with Marvel beyond local–global and state–market binaries. Ultimately, my analysis complicates the smooth thread that links together the superhuman individual, nationalist sovereign power, and international order, thereby re-evaluating state-endorsed cinema’s role within Chinese media cultures and social fields. Full article

Hollywood will encounter some cultural policies when its films are imported to the Chinese film market on a revenue-sharing basis. These include a quota system, a censorship system and an uncertain release schedule. However, China has been the fastest growing film market since 2008 and the second largest film market in the world since 2012 (yet the current film industries worldwide are recovering from the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic). Despite the restrictive cultural policies, Hollywood, attracted by the promising profitability, have incorporated more Chinese roles and more plots about China to please the Chinese film regulators and audiences in order to gain access to the lucrative Chinese film market. Furthermore, the depiction of China has become more positive and diverse in recent Hollywood blockbusters compared with the Orientalist stereotypical images in the past. The author intends to examine the reasons behind the phenomenon through analysing the positively changing images of China from early Hollywood films to the recent Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the positively changing depiction of China illustrates China and the US negotiating the dynamic process of cross-cultural exchange in economic and political terms through compromise, competition and collaboration. Full article

In the first part of this paper, we have introduced a novel theoretical approach to mating dynamics, known as Tie-Up Theory (TU). In this second part, in the context of the bio-cultural approach to literature, that assigns to fictional narratives an important valence of social cognition, we apply the conceptual tools presented in the first part to the analysis of mating-related interaction dynamics in some blockbuster Hollywood movies from WWII to today. The interaction dynamics envisioned by our theory accurately reflect, to a significant level of detail, the narrative development of the movies under exam from the viewpoint of the mating dynamics of the couple of main characters, accounting for the specific reasons that lead them to react to certain situations via certain behaviors, and for the reasons why such behaviors lead to certain outcomes. Our analysis seems thus to bring some further legitimacy to the bio-cultural foundation of the narrative structure of the movies that we analyze, and moreover to the idea that it is possible to ‘inquire’ characters about their choices according to the narratological-experimental lines suggested by some proponents of the bio-cultural approach. Full article