Staging Chinese revolution : theater, film, and the afterlives of propaganda / Xiaomei Chen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chen, Xiaomei, 1954- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--Political aspects--China--History--20th century.

Theater.

Heads of state--China--Biography.

Heads of state.

Biography--Political aspects.

Biography.

China--History--1949---Historiography.

China.

China--Politics and government--1949---Biography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (378 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, [New York] : Columbia University Press, 2017.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Propaganda Performance, History, and Landscape

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

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780231541619

0231541619

OCLC:

979577927