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.
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Propaganda Performance
1. The Place of Chen Duxiu: Political Theater, Dramatic History, and the Question of Representation
2. The Return of Mao Zedong: A People’s Hero and a ‘New’ Legacy in Postsocialist Performance
3. 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 Restorations
Epilogue: Where Are the ‘Founding Mothers’?
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Xiaomei Chen (Indiana Ph D) 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).More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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