Staging Chinese Revolution

Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-16638-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 384 Seiten, Format (B × H): 257 mm x 165 mm, Gewicht: 636 g

Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship. Spanning the 1960s through the 2010s, Xiaomei Chen reads films, plays, operas, and television shows from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective, demonstrating how, in a socialist state with "capitalist characteristics," propaganda performance turns biographies, memoirs, and war stories into mainstream ideological commodities, legitimizing the state and its right to rule. Analyzing propaganda performance also brings contradictions and inconsistencies to light that throw common understandings about propaganda's purpose into question.

Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the "founding fathers" of the Communist Party, such as Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping, and the engaging mix of elite and ordinary characters that animate official propaganda in the private and public sphere. Taking the form of "personal" memories and representing star and youth culture and cyberspace, contemporary Chinese propaganda appeals through multiple perspectives, complicating relations among self, subject, agent, state building, and national identity. Chen treats Chinese performance as an extended form of political theater confronting critical issues of commemoration, nostalgia, state rituals, and contested history. It is through these reenactments that three generations of revolutionary leaders loom in extraordinary ways over Chinese politics and culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chen, Xiaomei

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Politische Propaganda & Kampagnen, Politik & Medien
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Gewalt Revolutionäre Gruppen und Bewegungen, Bewaffnete Konflikte
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Propaganda Performance1. The Place of Chen Duxiu: Political Theater, Dramatic History, and the Question of Representation2. The Return of Mao Zedong: A People's Hero and a "New" Legacy in Postsocialist Performance3. The Stage of Deng Xiaoping: The "Incorrigible Capitalist Roader"4. The Myth of the "Red Classics": Three Revolutionary Music-and-Dance Epics and Their Peaceful RestorationsEpilogue: Where Are the "Founding Mothers"?NotesWorks CitedIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Chen, Xiaomei
Xiaomei Chen (Indiana PhD) is professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film and the Afterlives of Propaganda (CUP, 2016); Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (Oxford, 1995; second and expanded edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Hawai'i, 2002); and editor of Reading the Right Text (Hawai'i, 2003) and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (CUP, 2010; abridged edition 2014).

Xiaomei Chen is professor of Chinese literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis, where she also teaches performance studies and comparative literature. She is the author of Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (1995; second and expanded edition, 2002), Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (2002) and editor of Reading the Right Text (2003) and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (Columbia, 2010; abridged edition 2014). She is the coeditor, with Claire Sponsler, of East of West: Cross-Cultural Performances and the Staging of Difference (2001); with Julia Andrews, of Visual Culture in Contemporary China (2001); and, with Steven Siyuan Liu, Hong Shen and the Modern Medisphere in Republic Era China (2015).