Staging Chinese Revolution : theater, film, and the afterlives of propaganda

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Title:

Staging Chinese Revolution : theater, film, and the afterlives of propaganda

Author:

Chen, Xiaomei, 1954- author.

ISBN:

9780231166386

9780231541619

Personal Author:

Chen, Xiaomei, 1954- author.

Physical Description:

xii, 363 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Contents:

Introduction: Propaganda performance, history, and landscape -- The place of Chen Duxiu: political theater, dramatic history, and the question of representation -- The return of Mao Zedong: a people's hero and a "new" legacy in postsocialist performance -- The stage of Deng Xiaoping: the "incorrigible capitalist roader" -- The myth of the "red classics": three revolutionary music-and-dance epics and their peaceful restorations -- Epilogue: Where are the "founding mothers"?.

Subject Term:

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

Heads of state -- China -- Biography.

Biography -- Political aspects.

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Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library	Book	DS777.549 .C47 2016	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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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.

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Choice Review

Though it may seem institutionalized, propaganda can be deeply intertwined with personal memories and provoke nostalgic emotions. Propaganda performances in China shape national and personal histories. Chen (Chinese literature, Univ. of California, Davis) examines two primary genres, historical narratives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and propaganda drama (theater, film, and television). In her introduction Chen argues that propaganda, often dismissed by journalistic discourses, is far from a "monolithic, top-down" practice characterized "solely by censorship and suppression of freedom." Only by treating propaganda as "a dialogic and dialectical process" can one fully understand the forces and contradictions of this particular form of expression, which is not limited to totalitarian regimes but appears in various guises in all societies. Considering genres ranging from huaju plays and music and dance theater to eulogy, the four chronological chapters focus on key "founding father" figures (and works) in modern Chinese history: Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and the "red classics." One of the CCP's biggest challenges is to maintain its monopoly (single-party control borrowed from Leninism) while developing an economy with "capitalist characteristics." Chen shows how propaganda produces narratives that hold the socialist state together. Not to be missed is the epilogue, in which Chen asks, "Where are the founding mothers?" Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. --Alexa Huang, George Washington University

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction: Propaganda Performance, History, and Landscape	p. 1
1 The Place of Chen Duxiu: Political Theater, Dramatic History, and the Question of Representation	p. 56
2 The Return of Mao Zedong: A People's Hero and a "New" Legacy in Postsocialist Performance	p. 101
3 The Stage of Deng Xiaoping: The "Incorrigible Capitalist Roader"	p. 165
4 The Myth of the "Red Classics": Three Revolutionary Music-and-Dance Epics and Their Peaceful Restorations	p. 235
Epilogue: Where Are the "Founding Mothers"?	p. 287
Notes	p. 297
Works Cited	p. 317
Index	p. 341

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