Organizer and Chair: Mary B. Rankin, Independent Scholar
Deconstructing Orientalism: Reading Victor Segalen's René Leys
Sing-chen Lydia Francis, Stanford University
Victor Segalen (1878-1919), a French writer and traveler who made the East a "career," was a quintessential "Orientalist" by Edward W. Said's definition. It follows, according to Said, that all his writings regarding the East necessarily perpetuate the Orientalist discourse that is "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." However, as a reader, I find it problematic to consistently apply to the study of literature Said's theory that "what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his reader's eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions." Said's own conviction, when applied to literary criticism, threatens to become a "Saidian" critical discourse that could be severely limiting to critical acknowledgment of the range of readings afforded by a text. Using as a case study Segalen's novel, René Leys, I will attempt to counter Said's theory by demonstrating how the novel, by deconstructing itself, ultimately transgresses and transforms the "Orientalist" literary tradition that has paradoxically made the writing and reading of it possible.
A plot summary of René Leys-a Frenchman's confessions of his unfulfilled desires to penetrate China's imperial "Within" (le "Dedans"), and to find out the answer to the question, "Can a European love a Manchu woman, and be loved by her?"-does seem to describe a story entirely built on the standard Orientalist trope, "penetrating the feminine Orient." However, in my paper I will discuss how the novel deconstructs itself and subverts the very Orientalist premise it is built on. I will begin by situating René Leys in the European novelistic tradition of "the fantastic," using Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the genre as my paradigm. I will then demonstrate how the novel, by employing the literary techniques of the fantastic, causes the reader to experience a hesitation between the real and the imaginary that is similar to what one experiences when reading the fantastic. Specifically, I will discuss in detail how the novel forces the reader to experience an uncertainty between the Occidental perception of the Orient and the reality of the perceived. In other words, I will show how the text leads the reader to question and discredit an Orientalist fantasy, and ultimately "exorcise" it through the act of reading. In deconstructive terms, I will show how the text constructs the Orientalist vision by positing binary oppositions of the Occident vs. the Orient, and how it dismantles the Orientalist fantasy by deconstructing such a duality.
Moved to Tears and Laughter: The Comic in Contemporary Singaporean and Taiwanese
Theatre
Catherine Diamond, Soochow University
The two comic playwrights, Li Guoxiu and Michael Chiang, are the most popular writers for the stage in their respective countries. Li, in Taiwan, has been dubbed "Taiwan's Molière" because for the past nine years he has been writing and producing two sell-out comedies a year which he also directs and stars in. Li's plays have been performed to Mandarin-speaking audiences in Shanghai, Singapore, New York, and Los Angeles, though he is currently translating one into English to reach other audiences.
Chiang in Singapore writes and publishes in English. His comedies are consistently in demand, playing to massive audiences, and reflect the multi-ethnic composition of Singaporean society. One of his plays has been performed in Japan where spectators appreciated both his facility with the English language and his discernible Singaporean flavor.
Both Li and Chiang satirize many aspects of their societies, use familiar character-types, and derive much of their popularity from the fact that they speak directly to local audiences. Often comedy like theirs responds to current social concerns more quickly than serious drama, and reflects the mood of the society towards itself.
The two playwrights, however, employ very different techniques and styles to achieve their comic aims. An analysis of these demonstrates the range of theatrical humor with roots in both Western and traditional Asian comedy, and reveals the ways in which the comic draws upon and responds to a particular community while potentially appealing to foreign audiences as well.
Memory, Sound, and Identity: Musical Experience of the Teochew Chinese in
Contemporary Bangkok
Frederick Lau, California Polytechnic State University
Teochew is one of the largest groups of ethnic Chinese in Thailand. Their relatively long history of coexistence with the indigenous population and significant contributions to the local economy have granted them a unique position in Thai society. Scholars thus consider them as successfully assimilated into the host country. Despite the fact that Teochew-Thai has adopted a Thai life style and culture, many Teochew cultural practices still survive in contemporary Thailand. This paper explores this cultural complex and its meaning by focusing on the Teochew music scene and musical experience in Bangkok.
To date, there is a substantial number of active Teochew music clubs in the city of Bangkok. Musicians hold weekly gatherings in club houses to perform Teochew ensemble music for each other. This paper focuses on the way members of this minority community express their identity and memory of their homeland through music. An examination of the ethnographic data collected in 1995 reveals that Teochew musical clubs function as a mechanism to articulate and maintain a Teochew identity, similar to regional and same surname associations established in Thailand since the first part of this century. By studying the musical practice, repertory, and behavior of the musicians, this paper argues that expressive cultures such as music and language often assume the role of a symbolic identity marker. Using the Teochew in Bangkok as a case study, this paper offers an opportunity to re-think the assimilation model as applied to contemporary overseas Chinese communities and to define Chineseness in a diasporic context.
Gender and Culture in Madama Butterfly and Turandot
Sandra Davis, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
New interpretations of Europe's enduring artistic products from alternative disciplinary points of view have provided insights for musicologists analyzing opera, as well as for scholars of the other humanities. With its simultaneous textual and nonverbal components, opera provides a richly complex and subtle expression of the gender and cultural perspectives of its creators, while powerfully affecting its consumers. Although stereotypes of Eastern cultures are seen in the atmosphere created for Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot, the central dramatic confrontations are those of gender rather than of culture.
Creating appropriate theater atmosphere for his chosen subjects was paramount to Puccini. For Madama Butterfly (1904, set in Japan) and Turandot (1926, set in China), he sought out authentic native music samples, weaving these materials into his personal compositional idiom together with other "exotic" style elements; these elements were superimposed on traditional European operatic forms and values. The later tradition of casting Asian women as these Italian-conceived Asian heroines adds yet another dimension.
One of the most demanding of opera composers in the shaping of libretto elements, Puccini went far beyond his literary sources, molding character and action to his musicodramatic ends. Although sources of the Butterfly story include Orientalist tales of "soldier and exotic" encounters such as those of Pierre Loti, Puccini's Butterfly was transformed into the most completely realized and powerfully sung of all Puccini's women, who typically suffer for love.
Turandot, from a 1761 Italian play by Gozzi based on an Oriental folk tale, is a grand opera which incorporates elements of the Venetian commedia dell'arte. Unlike Madama Butterfly, where juxtaposition of discrete 'Eastern' and 'Western' musical styles support the plot, Turandot is saturated throughout with the exotic atmosphere of authentic and pseudo-Chinese melody and instrumental color. Although in many ways opposite to the usual Puccini women, the imperious and icy princess Turandot finally succumbs like them to the power of love-the gender struggle again dominating the drama.