Libros

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice, theory, and teaching of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting injuries, crimes, and accidents, to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual ‘meaning- making’. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also reflects current cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image, but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like an all too vivid video game or immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. As the reality of fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty and longing. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law’s claim to power. To meet this crisis, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers both a cultural diagnostic, identifying the contemporary cultural conditions in which law lives as a digital image on the screen, and a normative response, arguing for an affirmative, post-positivist jurisprudential paradigm that is adequate to the challenge these conditions present.

The Music Industry Handbook provides a clear introduction to how the music industry works, unpacking the complex structures within the industry and mapping it as it exists today. Paul Rutter introduces readers to key industry sectors in an easy-to-digest format, then goes on to explore the essential elements of these sectors and how they work in practice.

The Music Industry Handbook opens with a foreword by Feargal Sharkey, and boasts interviews and profiles with major figures in the industry such as Pete Astor, Marius Carboni, Stu Lambert, Simon May and Mike Smith, offering insightful background knowledge into working in the music business. The book has a practical focus, yet it also discusses relevant theoretical perspectives and chronology, and thus avoids being simply an ‘exposé’. In a fast-evolving market, the author offers advice on keeping up-to-date with future developments, and guides those wishing to enter the industry on the myriad of roles available.

The Music Industry Handbook provides valuable business strategies and ‘start-up’ tools for those that wish to set up independent music ventures, and offers clear explanations of numerous issues including legal trading, ownership and IP music law, copyright, exploitation and protective measures, gatekeeping and hidden music income streams. Throughout the book are suggestions for further reading and valuable source links that guide the reader towards key music industry and media texts, as well as a comprehensive glossary of industry-related terms.

The Music Industry Handbook will be invaluable to both new and veteran music-makers, promoters, musicians and managers, and students who want to build confident futures within the music industry.

This volume of original essays fills a significant research gap in Chinese film studies by offering an interdisciplinary, comparative examination of ethnic Chinese film stars from the silent period to the era of globalization. Whereas studies of stars and stardom have developed considerably in the West over the past two decades, there is no single book in English that critically addresses issues related to stars and stardom in Chinese culture.

Chinese Film Stars offers exemplary readings of historically, geographically and aesthetically multifaceted star phenomena. An international line up of contributors test a variety of approaches in making sense of discourses of stars and stardom in China and the US, explore historical contexts in which Chinese film stars are constructed and transformed in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, and consider issues of performance and identity specific to individual stars through chapter-by-chapter case studies. The essays explore a wide range of topics such as star performance, character type, media construction, political propaganda, online discourses, autobiographic narration, as well as issues of gender, genre, memory and identity.

Including fifteen case studies of individual Chinese stars and illustrated with film stills throughout, this book is an essential read for students of Chinese film, media and cultural studies.