Session 19: Cultural Production in the Era of Globalization

Organizer: Tonglin Lu, University of Montreal

Chair: Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

Discussant: Maureen Robertson, University of Iowa

Over the last several decades, globalization has brought sea changes to Asian societies. At the same time, the rapid economic development in this region has also changed the map of the global village. Has globalization been merely a continuation of modernization, and thus, brought about a different phase of colonization—as suggested by Myoshi? Or has this process marked a break from traditional imperialism, and thus, offered more freedom to peripheries in the global and "multicultural" empire—as argued by Hardt and Negri?

Instead of trying to find a black-and-white answer (which does not exist anyway), we consider globalization as a process of constant negotiations and resistances among various social, economic, and political forces. To what extent have these negotiations and resistances at different levels in a global context transformed Asian cultures? In what sense has cultural production influenced the directions of the process of globalization?

Partly to address these issues, the current panel will examine various areas of cultural production in Chinese-speaking regions through its literature, visual arts, and, popular culture. The impressive amount of investments in Asian cultural production by multinational corporations has no doubt contributed to the globalization of Asian cultures. Often states, including the communist government in China, share similar concerns with multinational corporations. At the same time, the control over cultural production has been counterbalanced by an effect of decentralization created by the process of globalization and the multiplication of media at the information age. Instead of promoting monolithic value systems, cultural products in the era of globalization often appear self-contradictory, embracing various, if not opposite, value systems, be they traditional or modern and local or global. In this context, these products are by definition market-oriented in their ambiguity or hybridity. In this panel, we will use various cultural products as test cases to deepen our understanding of this complicated phenomenon called globalization. Wendy Larson examines reconfiguration of the Chinese countryside reflected in fiction and film. Nick Kaldis studies the racist component in Li An’s popular movie produced by Hollywood, an international box office hit. Tonglin Lu’s paper deals with the portrayal of Asian religion in two Chinese-language films sponsored by the Asian branch of Columbia Pictures. From different perspectives and through the analyses of different media in Chinese-speaking regions, this panel will offer a picture of changing cultural production in the era of globalization.

"I Thought You Were Han": Intra-Asian Racism in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Nicholas A. Kaldis, State University of New York, Binghamton

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon has been well-received by both American and international audiences and film critics. Upheld as an example of Chinese film establishing a presence in the international market, the film had both huge box office and video profits. What has rarely been discussed, however, is the logic of racial binarism in the film.

Han Chinese in this film are models of social conformity, displaying obedience to government laws and social mores, and upholding the Jiang Hu (knight-errant culture) code of righteousness. The Han heroes are conservative in their sexual relations as well, struggling to remain chaste in exchange for a spiritual union in the afterlife and superior martial arts techniques in this life.

Non-Han characters, on the other hand, are violators of the same social mores, laws, and values dear to the Han characters. Associated with animal names and displaying animal-like barbarity, they prioritize flesh over mind and spirit, abandon themselves to lust, and impetuously act on their emotions.

In this paper, I present numerous examples of this bipartite structure, followed by an analysis of the reasons why the representation of race in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon augurs a new development in the "production of difference for exoticist consumption," as Shih Shu-mei and others have termed it. Formerly a subalternized (exoticized, feminized, racialized) object of Orientalist fantasy and exploitation, China is refashioning its image vis-à-vis the representation of its own internalized and subalternized racial others. In order to forge a new global identity and become a global subject, images of China and the Chinese (Han) cannot continue to be marginalized and subalternized in the global symbolic order. In order to assert itself as an equal (a "competitor") in that order, China has to produce cultural products that are successful in the international market, while simultaneously representing China not merely as an exotic other in the global cultural imaginary, but as a subject with images of its own internalized subaltern and exotic others. Thus, race in this film signifies an internal and orientalized other who is "less-than-us," a sign of Chinese aspirations to the position of subject and agent on the global stage.

The Rural Is Real: Wang Anyi, Wushan yunyu, and the New Global Countryside

Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

The dichotomy between the city and the country was a central concept under revolutionary culture, when Mao’s suspicion of intellectuals, bureaucracies, and industrialization formed a structure under which rural values of simplicity and directness came to the fore in ideology and culture. Under a reform project that is more globalized every year (in economic ties, cultural exchange, and the flow of workers), cultural views of the countryside as well as the economic and cultural conditions of the rural environment are changing rapidly. My paper investigates the emerging situation through the work of Wang Anyi, who was one of the first writers to represent the transforming identities of rural people, and Zhang Ming’s 1996 film Wushan yunyu (Clouds and Rain on Wu Mountain), which imaginatively chronicles the lives of villagers who will be dislocated through the Three Gorges dam project. Both Wang and Zhang remove rural people almost completely from common revolutionary representations and inject them with a reality that comes from actual economic and cultural reform rather than Maoist discourse, yet they retain and develop a link to the past through semi-mysticism or obscured, difficult-to-understand emotional motivation. This connection to the past is not strictly nostalgic, but rather represents a cultural check on the changes—based on the new globalism—sweeping the countryside.

Asian Religion Drenched in Blood

Tonglin Lu, University of Montreal

Recently Columbia Pictures sponsored two films in Asia: Double Vision (Taiwan, 2002) and Warriors of Heaven and Earth (China, 2003). Each of these films was box office hit among local moviegoers. Both focus on Asian religions: Taoism and Buddhism. In both cases, these religions are drenched in blood.

Among their numerous martyrs each film has chosen a foreigner, an American FBI investigator in the first, and a Japanese military man in the second; the two foreigners play crucial roles in the collective efforts to keep the supernatural forces under control, efforts led by the local governments. In each of these films, the sacrifice of the traditionally powerful outsider symbolizes the failure of rationalizing what is irrational, or the failure of westernizing what is non-western. Further, by multiplying different versions of realities with the help of cyberspace technology, eastern religions in these films relativize time and space—a remainder of the world of quantum physics. This remainder mirrors the superficial connection of The Matrix Reloaded with eastern religion, especially Buddhism.

As the uncontrollable sexuality of femmes fatales exemplifies the fear for feminism from a male perspective in films noirs in the mid-twentieth century, these two Asian films sponsored by Hollywood reveal a fear for the growing power in Asia. At the same time, unlike the death of femmes fatales at the end of films noirs, the survivors of the apocalypse are not the white males usually identified as subjects on screen, but the locals usually objectified by the camera—a major difference from traditional Hollywood movies dealing with Asian topics.

This difference may be explained mainly by two factors: 1) the need to address Asian audiences, 2) the participation of Asian filmmakers who are proud of growing regional power, incarnated by the supernatural power of Asian religions in these films. In both films, however, this power has broken away from the tradition of Chinese or Taiwan films of the same genre, characterized by the clear-cut moral division between the heroes and the villains. In these films, a happy ending in which the moral superhero conquers the world by vanquishing the villains is no longer possible, because the line of demarcation between good and evil has become part of virtual reality.