In the 1990s, China’s economic reform campaign reached a new high. Amid the eager adoption of capitalism, however, the spectre of revolution re-emerged. Red Classics, a historic-revolutionary themed genre created in the high socialist era were widely taken up again in television drama adaptations. They have since remained a permanent feature of TV repertoire well into the 2010s. Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China looks at the how the revolutionary experience is represented and consumed in the reform era. It examines the adaptation of Red Classics as a result of the dynamic interplay between television stations, media censorship and social sentiment of the populace. How the story of revolution was reinvented to appeal and entertain a new generation provides important clues to the understanding of transformation of class, gender, locality and faith in contemporary China.
The Making and Remaking of China’s “Red Classics” is the first full-length work to bring together research on the “red classics” across the entire Maoist period through to the reform era. It covers a representative range of genres including novels, short stories, films, TV series, picture books, animation, and traditional-style paintings. Collectively, the chapters offer a panoramic view of the production and reception of the original “red classics” and the adaptations and remakes of such works after the Cultural Revolution. The contributors present fascinating stories of how a work came to be regarded as, or failed to become, a “red classic.” There has never been a single answer to the question of what counts as a “red classic”; artists had to negotiate the changing political circumstances and adopt the correct artistic technique to bring out the authentic image of the people, while appealing to the taste of the mass audience at the same time. A critical examination of these works reveals their sociopolitical and ideological import, aesthetic significance, and function as a mass cultural phenomenon at particular historical moments. This volume marks a step forward in the growing field of the study of Maoist cultural products. “The Making and Remaking of China’s ‘Red Classics’ analyzes the creation of literature in the Maoist era as well as the way in which the revolutionary canon was rediscovered and imagined during the reform period. This book is a timely and fascinating set of studies, critically illuminating a foundational time during PRC history and its aftermath.” —Wendy Larson, professor emerita, University of Oregon “Creative works produced in the Mao era (1942–1976) are often dismissed as mere propaganda. Despite the fact that they are artistic reflections of that remarkable period, scholars have generally ignored these ‘red classics.’ This book throws much needed light on them. It is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the cultural scene in China.” —Kam Louie, honorary professor, University of Hong Kong and UNSW, Australia
The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.
Performing the Socialist State offers an innovative account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, it identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspirations for the social role and artistic achievements of performance across eras. Xiaomei Chen focuses on the long and remarkable careers of three founders of modern Chinese theater and film, Tian Han, Hong Shen, and Ouyang Yuqian, and their legacy, which helped shape theater cultures into the twenty-first century. They introduced Western plays and theories, adapted traditional Chinese operas, and helped develop a tradition of leftist theater in the Republican period that paved the way for the construction of a socialist canon after 1949. Chen investigates how their visions for a free, democratic China fared in the initial years after the founding of the People’s Republic, briefly thriving only to founder as artists had to adapt to the Communist Party’s demand to produce ideologically correct works. Bridging the faith play and “antiparty plays” of the 1950s, the “red classics” of the 1960s, and their reincarnations in the postsocialist period, she considers the transformations of the depictions of women, peasants, soldiers, scientists, and revolutionary history in plays, operas, and films and examines how the market economy, collective memories, star culture, social networks, and state sponsorship affected dramatic productions. Countering the view that state interference stifles artistic imagination, Chen argues that theater professionals have skillfully navigated shifting ruling ideologies to create works that are politically acceptable yet aesthetically ingenious. Emphasizing the power, dynamics, and complexities of Chinese performance cultures, Performing the Socialist State has implications spanning global theater, comparative literature, political and social histories, and Chinese cultural studies.
This collection explores the ways in which women in academia from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds mediate the negotiation of linguistic discrimination and linguistic diversity in higher education, using autoethnography to make visible their lived experiences. The volume shows how women in academia from CaLD backgrounds, particularly those living or working in the Global South, draw on their multivalent complex linguistic backgrounds and cultural repertoires to cope with, and manage, linguistic and systemic gender discrimination. In adopting authoethnography as its key methodology, the book encourages these academics to ‘write themselves’ beyond the conventions from which women in academia have traditionally been forced to speak and write. The collection features perspectives from women across geographic contexts, sub-fields and levels of experience whose stories are not often told, putting at the fore their narratives, lived experiences and career trajectories in mediating issues around power, ideology, language policy, social justice, teaching and learning, and identity construction. In so doing, the book challenges the wider field to expand the borders of discussions on linguistic discrimination and higher education institutions to critically engage with these issues. This book will be of interest to scholars in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and cultural studies.
This book investigates the meteoric rise of mobile webtoons – also known as webcomics – and the dynamic relationships between serialised content, artists, agencies, platforms and applications, as well as the global readership associated with them. It offers an engaging discussion of webtoons themselves, and what makes this new media form so compelling and attractive to millions upon millions of readers. Why have webtoons taken off, and how do users interact with them? Each of the case studies we explore raises interesting questions for both general readers and scholars of new media about how webtoons have become a modern form of popular culture. The book also addresses larger questions about East Asia’s contributions to global popular culture and Asian society in general, as well as South Korea’s rapid social and cultural transformation since the 1990s. This is a significant – and understudied – aspect of the new screen ecologies and their role in a new wave of media globalisation as we approach the end of the second decade of the 21st century.
Shanghai Tai Chi offers a masterful portrait of daily urban life under socialism in a rich social and political history of one of the world's most complex cities. Hanchao Lu explores the lives of people from all areas of society - from capitalists and bourgeois intellectuals to women and youth. Utilizing the metaphor of Tai Chi, he reveals how people in Shanghai experienced and adapted to a new Maoist political culture from 1949. Exploring the multifaceted complexity of everyday life and material culture in Mao's China, Lu addresses the survival of old bourgeois lifestyles under the new proletarian dictatorship, the achievements of intellectuals in an age of anti-intellectualism, the pleasure that urban youth derived from reading taboo literature, the emergence of women's liberation and the politics of greening and horticulture. This captivating, epitomizing, and vivid history transports readers to history as lived on Shanghai's streets and back alleyways.
What does it mean for a cinematic work to be "Chinese"? Does it refer specifically to a work's subject, or does it also reflect considerations of language, ethnicity, nationality, ideology, or political orientation? Such questions make any single approach to a vast field like "Chinese cinema" difficult at best. Accordingly, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas situates the term more broadly among various different phases, genres, and distinct national configurations, while taking care to address the consequences of grouping together so many disparate histories under a single banner. Offering both a platform for cross-disciplinary dialogue and a mapping of Chinese cinema as an expanded field, this Handbook presents thirty-three essays by leading researchers and scholars intent on yielding new insights and new analyses using three different methodologies. Chapters in Part I investigate the historical periodizations of the field through changing notions of national and political identity -- all the way from the industry's beginnings in the 1920s up to its current forms in contemporary Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global diaspora. Chapters in Part II feature studies centered on the field's taxonomical formalities, including such topics as the role of the Chinese opera in technological innovation, the political logic of the "Maoist film," and the psychoanalytic formula of the kung fu action film. Finally, in Part III, focus is given to the structural elements that comprise a work's production, distribution, and reception to reveal the broader cinematic apparatuses within which these works are positioned. Taken together, the multipronged approach supports a wider platform beyond the geopolitical and linguistic limitations in existing scholarship. Expertly edited to illustrate a representative set of up to date topics and approaches, The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas provides a vital addition to a burgeoning field still in its formative stages.
With over forty original essays, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures offers an in-depth engagement with the current analytical methodologies and critical practices that are shaping the field in the twenty-first century. Divided into three sections--Structure, Taxonomy, and Methodology--the volume carefully moves across approaches, genres, and forms to address a rich range topics that include popular culture in Late Qing China, Zhang Guangyu's Journey to the West in Cartoons, writings of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan, the Chinese Anglophone Novel, and depictions of HIV/AIDS in Chu T'ien-wen's Notes of a Desolate Man.
