Lady Gaga's work is noted for her references to the work of other artists and is often criticized for borrowed content that is perceived as exceeding mere generic norms. In this study, we engage closely with the musical and lyrical content of two songs from her extended play release, The Fame Monster (2009), with the goal of identifying and interpreting the intertextual pathways that led to these works. Relying upon theories of intertextuality, we unearth a network of texts invoked in each of her songs and consider these connections to comprise a musical genealogy, invoking Foucault's conception of genealogy as the process of revealing historical knowledge.

Focusing on a multimedia practice labelled ‘intermedia art’, this article shows how experimental musical practices complicate popular characterizations of the idea of politics in 1960s Japan that are polarized by their focus on extraordinary economic growth, on the one hand, and radical protest, on the other. Like their counterparts in art, experimental musicians and artists such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, and Yuasa Jōji took an interest in everyday sounds, spaces, and technologies as sites for artistic exploration. However, their musical approaches did not share the overtly political engagement with the scenes of protest playing out in the public sphere that played a central role in the visual arts. Through an investigation of the notion of ambiguity in the acoustics of intermedia, the article seeks to re-examine understandings about the role of sound in shifting perceptions about political participation.

This article is an institutional study on the history of the ill-fated Wusong Railway, China's first operational railway. The nine-mile light railway was built by the British firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. without the Qing government's permission. After negotiations with British diplomats, the Qing government agreed to purchase the line but the reformist governor-general Shen Baozhen later ordered it to be removed to Taiwan. Unfortunately funds were never provided for the rebuilding work. This article argues that it was the Qing government's failure to raise funds for capital-intensive projects that led to the railway's final destruction.

The Kwong Tai Company (光大公司 1917–1960) holds a unique position in modern Chinese history as the first joint-stock company registered in British Hong Kong that originated as an ancestral tong in South China. Its history reflects how a traditional ancestral tong adjusted its operations in a unique historical setting and coped with a new identity. This case provides a missing chapter in the story of how traditional Chinese corporate institutions came to terms with Western ideas of the company and company law. By looking into the institutional and cultural transformations of the Yip Kwong Tai Tong, this article reveals how traditional Chinese institutions responded to political and economic changes in Republican China, when the state in China evolved into a different form, and the ritual-based society was in decline, especially when the world economic system entered coastal China.

This article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europe were conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernist autonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness. Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyond their conventional geographical and historical demarcations.

In 1927, when the Nationalist Party under Chiang Kai-shek established a republic, they also established a list of urgent duties. One was to reform the government structure from top to bottom so as to show the rest of the world its capability to govern the country in a modern way. While big cities were the showplaces for modernization and state-building, down at the county level, Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed Zhongshan in Guangdong the “model county.” To maintain this honor and its benefits, the local authorities made special efforts to restructure the government; reforming and retraining the police force was one important aspect of this attempt. While it is commonly held today that in the 1930s and 1940s county governments in the Pearl River Delta had disintegrated and were dominated by “local bosses,” this article uses previously inaccessible local records to examine Zhongshan County government and reform to answer one particular question: whether Zhongshan was successful in forming a modern police force. It examines a number of problems related to inefficiency and ineffectiveness in government administration, but at the same time also discusses why many civilians were welcoming, rather than suspicious, of the police. The answers to these issues suggest that the overall structure and management of the Zhongshan government (and even social integration) was to some extent consolidated in this period.