[ China & Inner Asia, Table of Contents ]
[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Media, Market, and Multiplicities: Historical Representations in the Post-Socialist China
Organizer and Chair: Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St Louis
Discussant: Yuming He, University of Chicago
Even since the end of the Cultural Revolution and the opening of China to the world, the unspoken and forbidden past of China has fascinated both native Chinese and foreigners. First there was the obsession with the suffering of Chinese, and writings that articulated the pain and agony of Chinese under the Communist government emerged, “Wound literature” is a prominent example of the rising “fashion.” Foreign investigation of the recent Chinese past, though prohibited to some extents by the Chinese government, also rose to the global, popular obsession with the mysterious past of China. In a certain way, it is a global ramification of the native “wound literature.” Decades after abundant attempts to represent the historical past, however, reflections on the manners in which the past Chinese history are represented and inquiries into the practices of historical representation inevitably came into play. It is the purpose of the panel to explore and examine cultural practices, including writing and theater, that put into question traditional representations of the Maoist past. Through its investigation, the panel seeks to identify the ways in which the Maoist past is refashioned in the post-Maoist China, and how it is tinted with critical fervor.
This panel, specifically, explores various mnemonic practices and representations of the Mao era amidst China’s new market economy and post-socialist cultural order. By looking into diverse cultural texts that seek to represent the past, our panelists will focus on issues such as the discursive formation of the cultural memory of the Mao era, contemporary writers’ conscious engagement with cultural critique in order to formulate a personal memory in conversation with popular representations of history, the invocation and fabrication of history in different visual compositions pertinent to traditional Chinese costumes, and theatrical staging that aims at foregrounding and problematizing conventional realistic theater in its representation of historical events, such as the Land Reform and the Cultural Revolution.
The Making of Cultural Memory in Contemporary China: Looking
Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis
This paper explores the mechanism behind the formation of cultural memories of the Mao era after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform began to bear fruit in the 1990s. I will look into how China’s newly emerging market economy and cultural-economic globalization inform the popular imagination and cultural production of the recent past to become the cultural memory of the Mao era. Specifically I will focus on literary productions such as novels, memoirs and reminiscences about the Cultural Revolution by writers from China proper and the Chinese diasporas in the West.
Collective remembering of Mao’s legacy and specifically the era of the Cultural Revolution is primarily left with the popular media driven by a curious mixture of consumer market and government censorship. This combination inevitably creates what I call “lite memory” of a heavy and painful historical period. The emerging “lite memory” of this historical period takes on a form of easy, intimate, nostalgic, and at times cheerful recollections. The euphoria of China’s rapid modernization and economic success has overshadowed the urgent need to properly remember and reflect on the recent past that has characterized the modern China after WWII.
Stemming from this project are such questions that would demand our contemplation: Can a nation afford not to remember, or to remember ever so lightly (lite-ly), a large scale historical incident that has impacted millions of people such as the Cultural Revolution? What are the ramifications of such a collective forgetting? I hope to find answers to these questions.
Whose Cultural Revolution?: The Multiple Voices in Wang Anyi’s Individualistic Writing
Chao-mei Tu, Purdue University
When Cultural Revolution came to its end and new forms of socio-political development swept across China thereafter, critiques of the diverse manners in which the Cultural Revolution is represented in writing are on the rise. “Wound literature” no longer satisfies people’s desire to re-present the event, and the monotonous, emotional and physical agony which is its trademark has tired its readers who nevertheless are looking for a language that speaks the unspeakable with the power of “authenticity,” a language that is continuously renewed but challenged again. Much as a response to such desire, contemporary writers also consciously engage themselves with the socio-cultural controversy. They are extremely conscious of how others have contextualized the event when it comes to their own hand to re-imagine their experience. As Bakhtin’s concept of “heteroglassia” notices, their voice is not one that contains solely individual expression of what they “remember” of their lived experience, but how others remember and recontextualize the past in the present as well.
This paper will look into Wang Anyi’s writing, especially Fiction and Reality and Thirty Chapters of Flowing Current, to account for the phenomenon of heteroglassia in her novels and search for answers to the following questions. What does Wang consider of earlier writing of the Cultural Revolution? How does the voice of others infiltrate into her extremely individualistic narrative? And what does the form of the infiltration implicate in relation to the common cultural attempt to recontextualize the past in the present? How does Wang deal with the issue of the increasingly globalized narrative of the Cultural Revolution?
Fashioning History in the Mnemonic Ruins of Post-socialist China
Xiaojue Wang, Columbia University
This paper considers how history is fashioned, visualized, and performed through an inquiry into the representation of traditional costume in post-socialist Chinese literature, film, and art. As costumes hide, flaunt, or transform the human body, they also indicate a theatrical manifestation, or a dramatic enchantment, of the changeable relationship between humanity and history. Therefore, the representation of costume provides a particular way of fashioning and interpreting history.
The collapsing of a Maoist socialist idealism in China in the last couple of decades went hand in hand with a suspicious memory boom that has been enthusiastically consuming various historical and individual traumas, the Cultural Revolution in particular. The post-socialist era is permeated with ruins of the legacy of Chinese modernizations and revolutions. Indeed, it is impossible to envision history without seeing its looming phantom. The substance of traditional costume not only inhabits the ghost of history, but also constitutes a compelling trope for viewing it.
By examining representations of traditional costume in the 1959 Taiping Rebellion exhibition in the Museum of National History, the literary and filmic versions of Farewell, My Concubine, and the contemporary artist Wang Jin’s installation and performing art “A Chinese Dream,” this paper seeks to address some crucial questions such as: How is history invoked and fabricated in different visual compositions pertinent to traditional Chinese costumes? In what specific ways are the figure of history and the textile superficiality of costume related? To what extent is the issue of vision and visuality central to the construction and destruction of history memories? How are historical apparitions exposed visually in the mnemonic landscape of ruins and fragments?
Experimenting with Social Realism: Crossing Historical Chronotopes in Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana
Yuwen Hsiung, Union College
Modern Chinese drama has borne witness to the dominance of stage Realism since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century. The stage, however, underwen a series of changes after the end of the Cultural Revolution through various “exploration plays” as well as the little theatre movement. Both, however, are subject to various, oftentimes severe, critical responses. As one of the “frontier soldier” of the experimental theatre, Lin Zhaohua’s 1986 production, Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, stands as an allegory on the dramaturgy of staging the real, pointing to the questions of historical and ontological assumption that supports the theatre of Realism.
Irony arises when both the realists and the experimentalists happily find a meeting point in this play. On the one hand, the play rejoins the peasant parade in terms of its subject matter. On the other, the play skillfully employs a multitude of expressionist techniques, especially the free crossing between different chronotopes, to challenge the reality and rationality of historical events, such as the Land Reform Policy and the Cultural Revolution. By examining the play’s exploration of subjectivity on stage, this paper examines the issues of dramatic practices in relation to history and realistic discourses. How does Lin Zhaohua cultivate the idea of subjectivity through staging and performance? How is history dramatized on a stage that is seeking its liberation from the dominance of realist discourse and conventions? Do the courting and flirting with social realism signal any impact of global capitalism, which is fashioned in the form of postmodernist experiment in the play?