From Beijing with love: The global dimension of Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor

Famous for being the first foreign feature film that obtained permission to shoot in the Forbidden City, The Last Emperor (1987) is also one of the most ambitious and expensive independent productions of its time, awarded four Golden Globes and nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. In addition, The Last Emperor can be considered as one of the first attempts of cinematic collaboration between West and East, in a period of cultural and economic transformations witnessed by China. This article aims to offer an overview of the production history of The Last Emperor, focusing on the co-production collaborations and the outcomes of a western auteur’s gaze on Chinese history. Questions of Orientalism, travel narrative and critical reception are taken into account in order to engage with the transnational implications of Bertolucci’s film and the western fascination with China.

Bringing practice closer to research - seeking integrity, sincerity and authenticity

This article tackles the abundance of inconsistent terminologies that surround the discourse on practice and research. The text builds on recent debates on creative practice and education, sparked through the EU funded project SHARE. I argue that a shift in contemporary continental philosophy in the 1970s, which nudged the body into a more central position, allowed for creative practice and with it ‘embodied knowing’ to slowly push open the doors of the academies. I will show that practice today is already well embedded in some UK institutions, and I put forward that rather than thinking of an apologetic Practice as..., Performance as .., we should refer more resolutely to what I here term ‘Practice Research’. I demystify notions of validation of creative practice by re-emphasising the artistic qualities of ‘integrity, sincerity and authenticity’, borrowed from the 2013 BBC Reith lecturer and artist/potter Grayson Perry.

Ethics, power and space: International hospitality beyond Derrida

This article argues for the importance of hospitality in discussions of international ethics, suggesting that, while Jacques Derrida’s thought on the concept ought to be central, we also need to go beyond it. In particular, Derrida’s focus on the threshold moment of sovereign decision has the effect of reinforcing International Relations’ focus on the state as the only ethical actor and space. In contrast, this article suggests that we think of hospitality as a spatial relation with affective dimensions and a practice that continues once the guest crosses the threshold of the home. Conceived as such, hospitality reveals a constitutive relation between ethics, power and space, which directs us to the way hospitality produces international spaces and manages them through various tactics seeking to contain the resistant guest. This argument is illustrated through an examination of perhaps the most urgent of contemporary international ethical spaces: the refugee camp.