Volume 12 Issue 6
Published on October 2025In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx explores historical tradition and ideology in the context of the turbulent political landscape of 19th-century France. He provides a detailed analysis of how these elements shaped the mentality of the peasant class and facilitated Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état. At the same time, Marx reveals how the bourgeoisie, through historical imitation, deceived themselves and others to preserve their own interests. The illusory effect of historical tradition and ideology reflects the inheritability of ideology, indicating the need to establish a proletarian ideology to break the negative influences brought about by backward ideas.
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This paper explores how mother-daughter relationships serve as central sites of cultural negotiation and emotional labor in Chinese diaspora families. Through close readings of The Farewell (2019) by Lulu Wang and American Girl (2021) by Feng-I Fiona Roan, the study examines how intergenerational tension, shaped by divergent migration experiences, reveals the complexities of diasporic identity formation. While The Farewell depicts a voluntary return to China that allows for gradual cultural reconnection, American Girl presents a forced return to Taiwan Province prompted by illness, where the mother-daughter relationship becomes strained by emotional volatility and dislocation. In both films, mothers act as cultural mediators, navigating inherited traditions and unfamiliar environments while managing their own vulnerabilities. Drawing on theories of hauntology, affect, and cultural mediation, this paper argues that mother-daughter bonds are shaped not only by familial roles but by structural histories of migration, generational memory, and emotional transmission. Rather than portraying cultural identity as fixed or inherited, these films show it as a process of reassembly shaped by displacement, return, and everyday acts of care. By centering affective dynamics within transnational families, the analysis contributes to interdisciplinary conversations in diaspora and film studies, offering insight into how they lived experience of migration is negotiated through intimate, often ambivalent, relationships.
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In 2023, the term “dazi” was included in Yao Wen Jiao Zi’s “Top 10 Buzzwords of 2023.” Expressions such as “meal dazi” and “basketball dazi” have become widely popular on social media and in everyday life. Based on Fuyi Xing’s “Small Triangle” theory, this study analyzes “XX dazi” from three perspectives: the linguistic form, semantic content, and pragmatic value, employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. The study shows that “dazi” frequently collocates with disyllabic words; in addition to Chinese characters, some English words, numbers, and their combinations can also form collocations. Semantic evolution indicates that “dazi” first appeared during the Song Dynasty and exhibits the features of [+companionship], [+purpose], [+arbitrariness], and [+association]. Pragmatically, “dazi” serves functions including role identification, interpersonal relationship signaling, and emotional indication.
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Recent scholarly attempts to instill contemporary relevance in the ancient concept of tianxia (All Under Heaven) have reinvigorated interest in its rich meaning, multifaceted nature, and historical transformations. Yet the teleological reinvention of tianxia as a “Chinese theory of world politics” risks taking the words of the ancients out of context without a sound historical approach and interpretive sensitivity. This paper aims to historicize this intellectual project by first providing a coherent narrative of the historical transformations of tianxia during the classical and imperial periods—one that demonstrates the primacy of its political nature. It traces how the political-spatial configuration of tianxia evolved along the line of the yi-xia distinction, and how political unity and universalism gradually became entrenched as its core underpinnings. Having established the historical transformations of tianxia, the paper then critically examines the extrapolation and generalization of the concept into a contemporary theory of world order, exposing the teleology, anachronism, and essentialism embedded in this process. It concludes by considering how to reconcile the need for a philosophical foundation for theory with a historically grounded approach that avoids flattening or distorting the meaning tianxia in its original context.
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The Cold War referred to the all-out confrontation between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics between 1947 and 1991. After World War II, the US and the USSR became two poles of the world by virtue of their great strength, and they became opposed due to differences in ideology and geopolitics. Militarily, NATO confronts the Warsaw Pact and launches an arms race; Economically, the US implemented the Marshall Plan, and the USSR established the Economic and Mutual Association; There is also a fierce ideological confrontation. It profoundly affected the international landscape, economic development and cultural exchanges, and finally ended with the collapse of the USSR and the drastic changes in the Eastern Europe. As an important historical stage in the second half of the 20th century, the Cold War had an extremely far-reaching impact on the world.This article will introduce the basic concepts related to the Cold War, such as the historical background of the Cold War, the introduction of the two camps, the introduction of emphasis, the aspects of struggle, and the international political theories related to the Cold War. It also discuss the key events of the Cold War and discuss the impact of the Cold War and its implications for the present day from three periods: the pre-60s, the 70s, the 80s and beyond.
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Amid increasingly intertwined global media contexts, the cross-cultural circulation of gender discourse has become a critical focus in cultural studies. As a globally disseminated film, Brokeback Mountain not only challenges the heteronormative masculinity narratives embedded in traditional Western cinema but also elicits highly heterogeneous emotional responses and gender interpretations across cultural communities. Centered on the themes of masculinity negotiation and frontier myth deconstruction, this study constructs a transnational review corpus based on user-generated content from IMDb, Reddit, and Douban. By integrating natural language processing, visual Transformers, and multimodal sentiment recognition techniques, the study examines how users from different cultural backgrounds articulate masculinity, emotional repression, and sociocultural expectations through both text and imagery. The findings indicate that English-language discourse tends to emphasize identity dilemmas and emotional suppression, while Chinese-language discourse frequently frames masculinity in relation to family responsibility and moral order, highlighting the cultural adaptability and reconstructive nature of gender discourse in global media transmission. Moreover, the proposed multimodal fusion model demonstrates significant advantages in detecting implicit gendered emotions and resolving cross-modal semantic ambiguities. This research not only affirms the applicability of artificial intelligence in analyzing gender discourse within complex cultural environments but also provides methodological and theoretical insights for advancing gender equity communication in multilingual contexts.
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As a typical symptom of digital capitalism, digital labor alienation perpetuates the logic of alienation revealed by Marx while forming a more concealed exploitation system through data monopoly, algorithmic control, and platform hegemony. Analyzing the dual character of digital labor commodities and its new forms of alienation based on the labor theory of value reveals that capital achieves comprehensive domination over the labor process through technological empowerment, causing laborers to lose their subjectivity under the illusion of “free labor.” To sublate this alienation, practical efforts must unfold across three dimensions: promoting open-source technology and data commonization to dismantle capital's monopoly of the means of production, breaking platform discursive hegemony to reconstruct the cultural ecology of labor, and awakening the class consciousness of the digital proletariat to transform them from technological objects into historical subjects. This path of liberation constitutes both a contemporary development of Marx's theory of alienation and reveals the socialized potential of digital technology—only when algorithms and data return to the community of laborers can digital labor achieve its essential return from a “means of livelihood”to a “free conscious activity”,opening new historical possibilities for the comprehensive development of the person.
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The flourishing of tea-related activities among Jin-dynasty men of letters was rooted in the circulation of material goods and the continuity of techniques between the Song and Jin. Through the movement of tea, the use of tea wares, and diversified practices of tea drinking, tea culture among Jin literati transcended mere material enjoyment to become a key symbol bearing refined taste, sustaining social relations, and conveying emotion. Tea affairs were not only a cultural practice through which Han scholar-officials upheld tradition, but also an important pathway by which Jurchen aristocratic literati adapted to—and were transformed by—Sinicization. An analysis of tea culture thus reveals the reconstruction of identity against the backdrop of cultural hybridity in the Jin and enriches our understanding of Jin-dynasty culture.
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This study focuses on pictorial stones from Eastern Han tombs (25-220 CE) and adopts “physicality” as its core analytical perspective to explore the construction mechanism of sacredness in Han funerary culture. It constructs an interpretive framework of “image narrative—physicality perception—sacredness generation,” integrating key elements of funerary practice: regional variations in pictorial expressions, physical practices of the living, ritualized burial postures of the deceased, including supine extended burial and flexed burial, and symbolic imagery on stone coffins, depicting figures like the Queen Mother of the West, Fuxi, and Nuwa, as well as immortal spirit beasts. These elements interact dynamically with tomb spatial layouts to fulfil the narrative of soul ascension. Physicality, as a core link, not only bridges the Han people’s beliefs in life and death but also transforms static spatial narratives into a symbiotic realm of “heaven, earth, humans, and deities,” thereby systematically revealing how sacredness was generated, activated, and reinforced in Eastern Han funerary culture. This research introduces a context-rich, practice-oriented perspective to the study of Eastern Han pictorial stones, while laying a foundation for future inquiries into expanding regional scopes and material types.
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The research question is that to what extent did Chinese characters affect Korean and Japanese. The specific aspects that will be discussed are the history of Chinese characters, Korean alphabet and Japanese writing system, the connections between Chinese, Korean, and Japanese languages, and the influences on the cultures and developments. There are some significant reasons to do such a project. Learning about the relationships among East Asian languages would make it easier to understand the special links between Asian countries and, therefore, find solutions for cultural conflicts. Also, it is related to my personal interests. The methodologies mainly used in this project were to search for previous papers and collect data from some official databases. This project is greatly related to historical aspects, so the research done by others was essential. Some data from reliable data sources were also required to list some figures to support my idea. From this project, it is shown that there were very close relationships among East Asian countries in both linguistic and cultural aspects. Chinese characters were the root of the languages in China, Korea, and Japan. Therefore, it is important to know about Chinese characters when learning Chinese, Korean, or Japanese.
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