In City of Screens Jasmine Nadua Trice examines the politics of cinema circulation in early-2000s Manila. She traces Manila's cinema landscape by focusing on the primary locations of film exhibition and distribution: the pirated DVD district, mall multiplexes, art-house cinemas, the university film institute, and state-sponsored cinematheques. In the wake of digital media piracy and the decline of the local commercial film industry, the rising independent cinema movement has been a site of contestation between filmmakers and the state, each constructing different notions of a prospective, national public film audience. Discourses around audiences become more salient given that films by independent Philippine filmmakers are seldom screened to domestic audiences, despite their international success. City of Screens provides a deeper understanding of the debates about the competing roles of the film industry, the public, and the state in national culture in the Philippines and beyond.

"In the late tenth and eleventh centuries, a group of people known in Western and Japanese scholarship as the Tangut established an independent regime in the Ordos (present-day Ningxia, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia). It quickly grew into the Xia empire, a multiethnic, multilingual state whose ruling dynasty, a people ethnically and linguistically related to Tibetans, adapted elements of Chinese and Inner Asian statecraft, culture, and religion. Xia continued to grow in prominence, and its people became renowned throughout Asia as devout Buddhists. An imperial state was formally born in 1038 and chronicled its existence up to 1227, when it was finally crushed in Chinggis Khan's last campaign." "The Great State of White and High is the first book-length treatment in English of Tangut Xia history. Exhibiting a mastery of languages, Ruth Dunnell has produced a pioneering, systematic study using primary and secondary sources in Tangut and Chinese to reconstruct early imperial Xia history from the inside."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The book presents new advances in the field of manufacturing technologies. It focuses on the design and engineering of manufacturing processes; additive manufacturing and reverse engineering; assembly, disassembly and circular processes; system simulation, optimization and digital manufacturing; and materials processing technology. Keywords: Human Robot, Short Term Production Planning, Thermoplastic Composite Components, Compostable Materials, Diffusion Bonding, Superplastic Forming, Hardening Technologies, Physical Simulation Tests, Numerical Model, Dissimilar Material Welding, Additive Manufacturing, Laser Powder Bed Fusion, Fused Deposition Modeling, Laser Sintering, Fused Filament Fabrication, Manufacturing System Laser Welding, Wind Blades, Bandsaw Machine, PVC Tubes, Submerged Arc Welding, Multi-Layered Coatings, Cryogenics, Metal Piercing, Picosecond Laser Processing, Carbon Nanotube; Fiber Reinforced Composites, Tools With Complex Geometry. Carbon/Epoxy Composite, Rheological Additives, PP/flax Fibers, Human Well-being, Extruded Rods & Pipes, Laser Welding, E-mobility, WAAM Process, Glass Fiber.

Paola Brusasco's study offers an original insight into Sri Lankan literature in English and an exploration of cultural, social, and linguistic issues at the basis of the country's ethnic conflict. By focussing on two distinctive and representative writers, both Burghers, yet with different personal histories, Brusasco confronts issues of cartography, history, and language, all contributing to a specific definition of identity. Both Ondaatje and Muller are outsiders, the former because of his diasporic existence, the latter because of his excentricity within the reality of a divided country where the legacy of British colonialism and the process of redefinition following independence in 1948, as well as matters of geography and history, become crucial to writers.