The Cultural Revolution and Overacting

The Cultural Revolution and Overacting
Author: Tuo Wang
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0739192914

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which took place in China between 1966 and 1976, was a major political and social tragedy in Chinese history. As part of an effort to understand how the state enforced control amid seeming chaos, this book looks at the ubiquitous revolutionary presentations and performances of power, such as political rituals, revolutionary rhetoric, and public gatherings, in people’s everyday lives during the Cultural Revolution as performances that contributed to the control of the Chinese people. In particular, this book discusses how the promotion of revolutionary models in real life contributed to people’s eagerness to perform the role of the ideal revolutionary, and how the possibility of complete revolutionary transformation, promoted by the state media, and the hard fact that no one was able to completely become a Maoist subject, who would be completely selfless and think and speak only Maoist teaching, subjected people to a state of becoming but never fully having become. The fear of failing in the Maoist transformation constituted the inner mechanism that propelled ordinary people’s radical revolutionary behavior. In addition, this book examines the audience’s reaction to Jiang Qing’s court performance in the trial of the Gang of Four as an anarchic liberation from the revolutionary performance of the Cultural Revolution. Utilizing methodologies of cultural anthropology, linguistics, acting theory, and literary criticism, this book reveals how people’s performances of their everyday life functioned as mechanisms of social control.

Chinese Cinema

Chinese Cinema
Author: Jeff Kyong-McClain
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-07-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 988852853X

In Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization, a variety of scholars explore the history, aesthetics, and politics of Chinese cinema as the Chinese film industry grapples with its place as the second largest film industry in the world. Exploring the various ways that Chinese cinema engages with global politics, market forces, and film cultures, this edited volume places Chinese cinema against an array of contexts informing the contours of Chinese cinema today. The book also demonstrates that Chinese cinema in the global context is informed by the intersections and tensions found in Chinese and world politics, national and international co-productions, the local and global in representing Chineseness, and the lived experiences of social and political movements versus screened politics in Chinese film culture. This work is a pioneer investigation of the topic and will inspire future research by other scholars of film studies. “This edited volume offers a much-needed account of alternative ways of envisioning Chinese cinema in the special context of China and the world. Its vigorous theoretical framework, which puts emphasis on interactions in the context of China and the world, will complement and update publications in related areas.” —Yiu-Wai Chu, The University of Hong Kong; author of Main Melody Films: Hong Kong Directors in Mainland China “Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization offers a collection of studies of modern Chinese films and their global connections, with a contemporary emphasis. Its authors’ insightful analyses of films—famous, obscure, and new to the twenty-first-century screen—elucidate numerous contextual factors relevant for understanding the history and aesthetics of Chinese cinemas.” —Christopher Rea, The University of British Columbia; author of Chinese Film Classics, 1922–1949

The Art of Cloning

The Art of Cloning
Author: Pang Laikwan
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1784785229

Cultural production under Mao, and how artists and thinkers found autonomy in a culture of conformity In the 1950s, a French journalist joked that the Chinese were “blue ants under the red flag,” dressing identically and even moving in concert like robots. When the Cultural Revolution officially began, this uniformity seemed to extend to the mind. From the outside, China had become a monotonous world, a place of endless repetition and imitation, but a closer look reveals a range of cultural experiences, which also provided individuals with an obscure sense of freedom. In The Art of Cloning, Pang Laikwan examines this period in Chinese history when ordinary citizens read widely, traveled extensively through the country, and engaged in a range of cultural and artistic activities. The freedom they experienced, argues Pang, differs from the freedom, under Western capitalism, to express individuality through a range of consumer products. But it was far from boring and was possessed of its own kind of diversity.

The Changing Face of Women's Education in China

The Changing Face of Women's Education in China
Author: Xiaoyan Liu
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2017
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3643908172

This book offers a critical study on the history of Shanghai No.3 Girls' Middle School, from its missionary predecessors, St. Mary's Hall and McTyeire School, to its present form as a public school. By bringing together three historical periods, late imperial, the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China, and their respective political regimes into one project and tracing continuities and discontinuities in terms of education between the Nationalists and Communists, the book argues that education in Chinese modern history affords another example of "continuous revolution." Dissertation. (Series: Sinologie, Vol. 5) [Subject: Education, Chinese Studies, Asian Studies, Gender Studies, History, Politics]

Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera

Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera
Author: David Rolston
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 817
Release: 2021-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004463399

What was the most influential mass medium in China before the internet reaching both literate and illiterate audiences? The answer may surprise you...it’s Jingju (Peking opera). This book traces the tradition’s increasing textualization and the changes in authorship, copyright, performance rights, and textual fixation that accompanied those changes.

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures
Author: Aga Skrodzka
Publisher:
Total Pages: 799
Release: 2020
Genre: Art
ISBN: 019088553X

Looking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary
Author: Michael Berry
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2022-12-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3031168593

During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets. This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls. This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction

Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction
Author: Julia Novak
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031090195

This volume addresses the current boom in biographical fictions across the globe, examining the ways in which gendered lives of the past become re-imagined as gendered narratives in fiction. Building on this research, this book is the first to address questions of gender in a sustained and systematic manner that is also sensitive to cultural and historical differences in both raw material and fictional reworking. It develops a critical lens through which to approach biofictions as ‘fictions of gender’, drawing on theories of biofiction and historical fiction, life-writing studies, feminist criticism, queer feminist readings, postcolonial studies, feminist art history, and trans studies. Attentive to various approaches to fictionalisation that reclaim, appropriate or re-invent their ‘raw material’, the volume assesses the critical, revisionist and deconstructive potential of biographical fictions while acknowledging the effects of cliché, gender norms and established narratives in many of the texts under investigation. The introduction of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Red China's Green Revolution

Red China's Green Revolution
Author: Joshua Eisenman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231546750

China’s dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China’s future rapid growth. Red China’s Green Revolution tells the story of the commune’s origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China’s economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao’s collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping—not rural residents—who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China’s Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Revolutionary Stagecraft

Revolutionary Stagecraft
Author: Tarryn Li-Min Chun
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472903969

Revolutionary Stagecraft draws on a rich corpus of literary, historical, and technical materials to reveal a deep entanglement among technological modernization, political agendas, and the performing arts in modern China. This unique approach to Chinese theater history combines a close look at plays themselves, performance practices, technical theater details, and behind-the-scenes debates over “how to” make theater amid the political upheavals of China’s 20th century. The book begins at a pivotal moment in the 1920s—when Chinese theater artists began to import, use, and write about modern stage equipment—and ends in the 1980s when China's scientific and technological boom began. By examining iconic plays and performances from the perspective of the stage technologies involved, Tarryn Li-Min Chun provides a fresh perspective on their composition and staging. The chapters include stories on the challenges of creating imitation neon, rigging up a makeshift revolving stage, and representing a nuclear bomb detonating onstage. In thinking about theater through technicity, the author mines well-studied materials such as dramatic texts and performance reviews for hidden technical details and brings to light a number of previously untapped sources such as technical journals and manuals; set design renderings, lighting plots, and prop schematics; and stage technology how-to guides for amateur thespians. This approach focuses on material stage technologies, situating these objects equally in relation to their technical potential, their human use, and the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that influence them. In each of its case studies, Revolutionary Stagecraft reveals the complex and at times surprising ways in which Chinese theater artists and technicians of the 20th century envisioned and enacted their own revolutions through the materiality of the theater apparatus.