Liang Luo 羅靚 | University of Kentucky (original) (raw)

Books by Liang Luo 羅靚

University of Michigan Press, 2014

University of Michigan Press, 2021

This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American p... more This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American performer Paul Robeson as protagonists and highlights the internationalist and cosmopolitan forces in the making of modern Chinese culture. I continue the comparative approach introduced in my first book, in which Joris Ivens and Paul Robeson embody the tangled relationship among international avant-garde, international socialism, and Chinese revolutionary popular culture. Together with their counterparts in China, they created and disseminated Chinese revolutionary popular culture from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War. Chinese revolutionary popular culture, in turn, shaped the interwar international avant-garde and its postwar transformation.

Reviews of The Global White Snake by Liang Luo 羅靚

Intercultural Studies, 2024

Jamie J. Zhao's review of The Global White Snake

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2022

Aaron Balivet review of The Global White Snake for Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews,... more Aaron Balivet review of The Global White Snake for Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, vol. 44 (Dec. 2022), 329-333.

Asian Theatre Journal , 2022

An-Ru Chu review of The Global White Snake for Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 2 (Fall 2022),... more An-Ru Chu review of The Global White Snake for Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 2 (Fall 2022), 414-417.

American Review of China Studies, 2022

Journal of Asian Studies, 2022

Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, issue 1 (February 2022), 172-173. Liang Luo's The Global White... more Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, issue 1 (February 2022), 172-173.
Liang Luo's The Global White Snake is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the "nonhuman turn" that has emerged in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book-length study to examine the remaking of the White Snake legends in the contemporary world. In her first monograph, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 1 Luo discussed the White Snake's transformations from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People's Republic of China. In The Global White Snake, Luo consciously takes a "peripheral" approach by examining the White Snake legends in spaces outside mainland China. The author's multilingual ability allows her to trace the global travels of the White Snake legends in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English productions. The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the White Snake legends, which have traveled around the world as stories of hybridity, boundary-crossing, antiauthoritarianism, and gender politics. The rest of the seven chapters are divided into three parts: "The White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," "The Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War," and "The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture." In part one, chapter 2 includes discussions of American missionary Samuel Woodbridge's and American diplomat Frederick D. Cloud's translations of the White Snake legend around the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodbridge and Cloud mistook the continuity of the White Snake legend as a sign of China's static culture. However, Luo points out that from the 1870s to the 1920s, the White Snake legend had already assumed a new life in China thanks to "technological breakthroughs in theatrical representation, shifting performative paradigms regarding gender roles, and sociopolitical debate over what was considered normative" (p. 48). In chapter 3, Luo shows how the boundary between fantasy and reality dissolved as the White Snake was released to the Chinese cultural imagination after the sensational fall of the Leifeng Pagoda in 1924. During this period, the avant-garde, the commercial, and the popular formed a concerted effort to capitalize on the pagoda's visuality. The two chapters in part two examine the inter-Asian network of the White Snake industry through a set of films, including Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953); Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren, 1956); the Japanese animation Hakujaden (which was distributed in the United States in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent); two Korean-language films, Madam White Snake (Paeksa buin, 1960) and Snake Woman (Sanyȏ, 1969); and Love of the White Snake (Paeksajȏn, 1978). Through nuanced close reading, Luo shows that "the humanity of the nonhuman continued to emerge as the central trope in White Snake adaptations throughout the Cold War" (p. 142), which served to heal the postwar trauma, as well as suture the geopolitical division in Asia. Part three contains three chapters. Chapter 6 shows how the White Snake legends transmuted into stories of resisting the institution of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and authoritarianism in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee's fiction "Green Snake" and Chinese American writer Yan Geling's "White Snake." Chapter 7 discusses the multilocational and multilingual popular cultural phenomena and media events of the White Snake legends in three Anglophone productions-Zhou Long'

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2022

Weber, Noah Arthur. “Culture Is That Which Appropriates: A Review of Liang Luo’s The Global White... more Weber, Noah Arthur. “Culture Is That Which Appropriates: A Review of Liang Luo’s The Global White Snake.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Feb. 2022, chajournal.blog/2022/02/08/global-white-snake/.

Reviews of The Avant-Garde and the Popular by Liang Luo 羅靚

Asian Theatre Journal, 2019

Anne Rebull review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Asian Theatre Journal, Vol... more Anne Rebull review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 36, Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 509-512.

Comparative Literature & World Literature , 2017

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2016

Review of Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (Michigan, 2014)

Journal of Asian Studies, 2016

TDR: The Drama Review, 2016

Modern Drama, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 120-122. Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde... more Modern Drama, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 120-122.
Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China

Published in Theatre Journal, Volume 67, Number 3, October 2015, pp. 584-586.

Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2015, 9(2): 337-344.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture , 2015

Orientierungen Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, 2/2014 (26. Jg., Nr. 2)

Articles and Book Chapters by Liang Luo 羅靚

Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2023

University of Michigan Press, 2014

University of Michigan Press, 2021

Intercultural Studies, 2024

Jamie J. Zhao's review of The Global White Snake

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2022

Asian Theatre Journal , 2022

American Review of China Studies, 2022

Journal of Asian Studies, 2022

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2022

Asian Theatre Journal, 2019

Comparative Literature & World Literature , 2017

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2016

Review of Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (Michigan, 2014)

Journal of Asian Studies, 2016

TDR: The Drama Review, 2016

Published in Theatre Journal, Volume 67, Number 3, October 2015, pp. 584-586.

Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2015, 9(2): 337-344.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture , 2015

Orientierungen Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, 2/2014 (26. Jg., Nr. 2)

Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2023

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures , 2021

There is a long oral tradition and written record for the legend of the White Snake. As a woman, ... more There is a long oral tradition and written record for the legend of the White Snake. As a woman, her "original sin" is being a snake. She is a snake who has cultivated herself for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to attain the form of a beautiful woman. Living as a resident "alien" (yilei) in the "Human Realm" (renjian), the White Snake has always been treated with suspicion, fear, exclusion, and violent suppression/exorcism. The White Snake is an immigrant to the human world, whose serpentine identity made her a "resident alien," the legal category given to immigrants in the United States before they receive their "Green Card" and become a "permanent resident." The implication of being a snake woman in the human world took on new meanings when the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the existing xenophobia, fear, and suspicion toward minority populations in the contemporary United States and throughout the world. Inspired by the Chinese White Snake legend, the three Anglophone opera, film, and stage projects from Cerise Lim Jacobs, Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri, and Mary Zimmerman, energetically engage with issues relevant to minority activism in the United States and more broadly, through digital media and digital platforms.

《东岳论丛》, 2020

［摘要］“白蛇传说”这一深植于中国古老土壤的民间故事，在二十世纪之交中西方的跨文化之旅及多媒介表演中再度幻化出了新的色彩和面相。在美国传教士吴板桥和美国外交官克劳德的传说重述中，无论是“迷思”... more ［摘要］“白蛇传说”这一深植于中国古老土壤的民间故事，在二十世纪之交中西方的跨文化之旅及多媒介表演中再度幻化出了新的色彩和面相。在美国传教士吴板桥和美国外交官克劳德的传说重述中，无论是“迷思”还是“真知”的认定，都展示出白蛇传说在当时外交活动与教会话语中的中心地位，并为白蛇传说的跨文化阐释提供了鲜活的早期范例。与之相呼应，同一时期中文世界的白蛇传说，也通过印刷文字和舞台表演的新变，活跃在流行文化和日常生活的中心，在先锋与流行的交织与共振中，带动着技术、经济、政治的变迁并有力地塑造并折射出了大众想象与新媒体发展。

［关键词］二十世纪之交; 白蛇传说; 重述; 舞台表演; 新变

CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, vol. 39, no. 2 (December 2020), 182-197., 2020

This is a performance review of the Constellation Theatre Company (CTC)’s 2019 D.C. production of... more This is a performance review of the Constellation Theatre Company (CTC)’s 2019
D.C. production of The White Snake, written and originally directed by Mary
Zimmerman in 2012. This review connects the 2019 CTC production with the
2014 performance of the same Zimmerman play, directed by Zimmerman herself
on site at the Second Wuzhen Theatre Festival in Wuzhen, China. It further traces
a key inspiration of the 2012 Zimmerman play to Chinese writer Zhao Qingge’s
1956 novel Baishe zhuan (The Legend of the White Snake), which was itself a product
of the cultural politics of the Chinese 1950s and much longer oral, written, and
performance traditions.

澳門理工大學學報（人文社會科學版）, 2020

嚴歌苓1990 年代末創作於海外的中篇小說《白蛇》和李碧華1980 年代末創作於香港的長篇小說《青蛇》，皆為當代女作家對白蛇傳說的重要重述，並在參照閱讀中構成了有趣的互文。李碧華筆下叛逆的青蛇，... more 嚴歌苓1990 年代末創作於海外的中篇小說《白蛇》和李碧華1980 年代末創作於香港的長篇小說《青蛇》，皆為當代女作家對白蛇傳說的重要重述，並在參照閱讀中構成了有趣的互文。李碧華筆下叛逆的青蛇，以放縱的“亂舞”張揚着越界的慾望和無政府主義的衝動，而青蛇通過身體書寫所表達出的反抗性正是1980 年代充滿活力的香港文化和女作家自身的生動寫照。嚴歌苓則是通過舞者白蛇和帶有雌雄同體意味的女粉絲青蛇從1950 年代末至1980 年代初的錯綜複雜關係，展現了階級政治和性別越界之間的緊張與消解。兩部小說通過舞蹈與書寫、文本與身體，構成了慾望表達、自我發現和心靈治愈的創造性敘事。而小說《白蛇》和《青蛇》對身體越界與性別政治的凸顯，又分別指向了大陸、香港、及海外白蛇傳說重述的“後社會主義”與“後殖民主義”新階段。

Literature and Modern China, 2020

Abstract: This essay examines American missionary Samuel I. Woodbridge’s 1896 rendition of the Wh... more Abstract: This essay examines American missionary Samuel I. Woodbridge’s 1896 rendition of the White Snake legend, The Mystery of the White Snake, in the context of Woodbridge’s missionary and diplomatic endeavors. It argues for a close reading of the English text as a contribution to the White Snake repertoire, both in its literary qualities and in its articulation of the idea and practice of love and empathy. Woodbridge’s intention of using the White Snake text to reveal the danger of the Chinese popular mind and to critique the Buddhist doctrine of transmigration and its outdated practice of “animal worship,” however, backfired. He was seduced by the White Snake legend he had set out to criticize and was able to better understand the Chinese popular mind he had hoped to save, through the powerfully resilient popular legends such as the White Snake.

摘要：本文以美国传教士吴板桥1896年对白蛇传说的英文重述《白蛇之谜》为研究对象，将其置于吴板桥传教与外交活动的语境中进行分析。作者认为吴板桥的英文白蛇译介，因其文学价值和对爱与同情的理想与实践的张扬，成为白蛇传说重述谱系中的重要文本。吴板桥的本意是以白蛇传说为例，揭露中国大众心态中的危险因素，批评佛教轮回观念及其“过时”的“动物崇拜”。但在译介过程中，吴板桥自己也成为白蛇传说的信徒，并深深为其魅力所感染。通过对深刻持久地影响了大众心态的白蛇传说的译介，他得以更深切地体会自己试图“拯救”的中国民众的心态。

《电影研究》, 2018

英文学术界对电影《色·戒》的研究往往从女性主义和伦理主义的角度来解构民族主义与革命话语的宏大叙事。这样的解读令人信服地指出李安电影在对爱国者、刺客、汉奸的传统呈现方式之外所提供的另类叙事，但却陷... more 英文学术界对电影《色·戒》的研究往往从女性主义和伦理主义的角度来解构民族主义与革命话语的宏大叙事。这样的解读令人信服地指出李安电影在对爱国者、刺客、汉奸的传统呈现方式之外所提供的另类叙事，但却陷入了另一种刻板叙述。本文对李安电影的解读有别于此。与其说李安否定公共空间和政治性，不如说他殚精竭虑地构造了种种既有助于展演欲望与伦理的力量，又能张扬民族主义和革命冲动的表演。聚焦李安通过对流行音乐、政治宣传剧及左翼电影的创造性化用在影片中塑造的三个表演片段，本文认为民族主义和革命冲动在《色·戒》电影中非但没被否定，反而在与欲望和伦理的错综纠缠中更强势地卷土而回。

Forthcoming as Chapter 37 of The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature edited by Ming D... more Forthcoming as Chapter 37 of The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature edited by Ming Dong Gu

"The Humanity of the Nonhuman: Challenges from Green Snake and White Snake," in Shanghai Art Revi... more "The Humanity of the Nonhuman: Challenges from Green Snake and White Snake," in Shanghai Art Review, February 2017, no. 1, p24-27.《上海艺术评论》2017年第一期, 总第183期, 第24-27页.

Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin eds., Hong Kong Horror Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 34-51.

1. The White Snake Films: Complicating “Hong Kong Horror Cinema” 2. Horror in the White Snake Tal... more 1. The White Snake Films: Complicating “Hong Kong Horror Cinema”
2. Horror in the White Snake Tales: Sexual Encounters and Their Aftermaths
3. Horror in Early Experimental White Snake Films: the Tokyo and Shanghai Connections
4. The White Snake in Early Commercial Feature Film: Tianyi Film Company, Shanghai, 1926-7
5. Hong Kong-Japan Coproduction: Byaku fujin no yoren, Tokyo, 1956
6. Made in Hong Kong: The Shaw Brothers’ Madam White Snake, 1962
7. Connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan: The Love of the White Snake, 1978
8. Concluding Remarks: from Horrific Tales to Crowd Pleasers

Following Kenneth King’s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post-modern dance practices... more Following Kenneth King’s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post-modern dance practices and Kimerer L. LaMothe’s call for dance to be treated seriously in religious and philosophical discourses, I examine Yan Geling’s novella Baishe (White Snake, 1998), in relation to Lilian Lee’s novel Qingshe (Green Snake, 1986–93), with a focus on how dancing and writing function literally, metaphorically, dialectically, and reciprocally, in these narratives. In my textual and contextual analyses of Yan’s White Snake text, I borrow Daria Halprin’s therapeutic model for accessing life experiences through the body in motion. I argue that, through a creative use of writing and dancing as key metaphors for identity formation and transformation, Yan’s text, in the context of contemporary China, offers innovative counter-narratives of gender, writing, and the body. Yan’s White Snake is considered in the following three contexts in this paper: firstly, the expressiveness of the female body in the White Snake story; secondly, the tradition and significance of writing women in Chinese literary history; and thirdly, the development of dance as a profession in the PRC, with a real-life snake dancer at the center. These three different frameworks weave an intricate tapestry that reveals the dialectics of writing and dancing, and language and the body, throughout the latter half of twentieth-century China. Furthermore, Yan’s text foregrounds the Cultural Revolution as an important chronotope for experimentation with a range of complex gender identities in relation to the expressive and symbolic powers of dancing and writing.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 27, no.2 (Fall 2015), pp. 208-248.

Chen, Bo'er Guan, Hanqing Hong, Shen Jiao, Juyin Ouyang, Yuqian Pu, Cunxin Shi, Hui Shu, Xiuwen S... more Chen, Bo'er
Guan, Hanqing
Hong, Shen
Jiao, Juyin
Ouyang, Yuqian
Pu, Cunxin
Shi, Hui
Shu, Xiuwen
Song, Dandan
Tian, Han
Yan, Fengying
Ying, Ruocheng
Yu, Shizhi
Yuan, Xuefen
Zhu, Xu

Published in Trans-Humanities, Vol. 8, No. 3 (October 2015), pp. 85–109. Examining three dramatic... more Published in Trans-Humanities, Vol. 8, No. 3 (October 2015), pp. 85–109.
Examining three dramatic scenes of performance in Ang Lee’s 2007 ﬁlm Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story of the same name, this essay proposes to read Lee’s ﬁlm as an epilogue to a long-running narrative highlighting the intersection of performance and politics in twenty-century China. It argues, through a close examination of Lee’s creative use of such elements as popular music, political theater, and leftist cinema from the 1930s, that nationalism and revolution staged an intriguing comeback in Lust, Caution, intensiﬁed, rather than negated, by its intricate intertwinement with sexuality and ethics. In particular, the two popular ﬁlm songs from the 1930s with lyrics penned by Tian Han quoted in the ﬁlm, and their fascinating afterlives in contemporary popular culture represented by Leehom Wang, highlight the power of performance in shaping a complex range of gender, ethical, and political identities. The intersection of performance, politics, and popularity works magic throughout the ﬁlm. It enables Lee’s ﬁlm to go beyond Chang’s story in reinvigorating the political through the performative and the popular.

基於筆者在“視覺再現、世界文學與現代中國和東亞的左翼國際主義” 研討會上的英文發言。

香港《明報月刊》《明藝》專欄之「李歐梵專題」，2015年10月3日星期六，明報D6版。

文化研究年度报告（北京：社会科学文献出版社，2013）295-305。, Nov 2013

New Modern Chinese Women and Gender Politics, 2014

Twentieth-Century China, 2021

Journal of Asian Studies, 2021

Resisting Spirits resists the narrative of socialist cultural production as monolithic and uninsp... more Resisting Spirits resists the narrative of socialist cultural production as monolithic and uninspired and urges readers to consider the creativity and experimentation through which writers and artists navigated cultural and bureaucratic waters during the early 1950s and 1960s. This history of supernatural literature in the People's Republic of China (PRC) enables rigorous discussions about the relationship between mass politics and popular culture and the possibilities for artistic expression under high socialism. Meng Chao and his ghost opera, among other case studies, are lenses for Maggie Greene to connect the pre-1949 and post-Mao cultural milieus with the high socialist period to reflect on how cultural workers made difficult, creative choices dealing with historical changes. Following Gail Hershatter, Greene proposes to read ghost plays "in a longer 'literary time' that connected the Mao era to the deeper cultural past" (p. 16) to counter sweeping narratives focusing on "campaign time." 1 She takes seriously cultural producers' passionate defense of classical culture and broad talents in recreating supernatural narratives under socialism. Greene complements the pervasive practice of "symptomatic reading" in the study of socialist cultural productions by borrowing the concept of "just reading" or "surface reading." 2 She insists on doing justice to her texts by paying attention to the "surface" of their discussions, that is, "what critics and artists openly and plainly said, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s" (p. 19). This approach not only balances the predominant reading of socialist culture from the dominant perspective of bureaucratic control but also opens up the high socialist period to linkages across time. Greene tackles the differentiation between "mythology" and "superstition" by discussing early drama reform in the PRC in chapter 1. At the center of the chapter is a discussion of adaptations of the folktale "The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid" (Niulang zhinü), which reflects the malleability of socialist vocabulary and tensions even among the highest levels of producers and critics of "state-sponsored culture" (p. 25). This was manifested in a debate on Yang Shaoxuan's "unrestrained" adaptation of the folktale and Ai Qing's and Ma Shaobo's advocating a gentle touch on the classics.

The PRC History Review Book Review Series, 2019

PRC History Book Review Series No. 7: Brian DeMare. Mao’s Cultural Army. Drama Troupes in China’s... more PRC History Book Review Series No. 7: Brian DeMare. Mao’s Cultural Army. Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Reviewed by Liang Luo with a response from Brian DeMare.

Association for Chinese Animation Studies Film Reviews , 2019

Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), No. 40 (December 2018), 249-252., 2018

Review of Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propagan... more Review of Xiaomei Chen, Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia University Press, 2016), Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, No. 40 (December 2018), 249-252.

Journal of Asian Studies , 2018

Luo, L. (2018). The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. By Haiyan Lee. Stanford, Calif.: ... more Luo, L. (2018). The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination. By Haiyan Lee. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014. xii, 362 pp. ISBN: 9780804785914 (cloth, also available as e-book). The Journal of Asian Studies, 77(4), 1074-1076.

CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature , 2017

Comparative Literature & World Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2017, p76-79.

Modern Drama, 2016

Modern Drama, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter 2016), 512-515.

The Journal of Asian Studies / FirstView Article / January 2016 pp16-18.

MCLC Resource Center, December 2015

Dissertation Reviews, Apr 22, 2013

American Journal of Play, 2013

Education About Asia, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 2007

Talks given at “Trans-literary Experiments: Cultural Transformation and Social Change in Modern E... more Talks given at “Trans-literary Experiments: Cultural Transformation and Social Change in Modern East Asian Societies,” Harvard University, April 29, 2016, and at "Border-Crossing in the East Asian Cultural Sphere," George Washington University, April 30, 2016.

Multiple layers of historical mediations are at work in Chaoxian fengyun 朝鮮風雲 (Storms over Choson... more Multiple layers of historical mediations are at work in Chaoxian fengyun 朝鮮風雲 (Storms over Choson), a thirteen-act play written in 1948 and published in 1950 in Shanghai by the Leftist playwright Tian Han 田漢. Centered on events taken place in the early to mid-1880s leading to the Frist Sino-Japanese War (1894-5), Storms over Choson reads like a detective story written from the perspectives of all involved, instead of only favoring one voice or one perspective. Reading the play today, we are compelled to reflect on the convergences and divergences in sensibilities and visions among the mid 19th (Taiping Rebellion), the late 19th (Frist Sino-Japanese War), the mid 20th (Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, and the Korean War), and the early 21st centuries’ global contexts.

Born in Changsha in the late 1890s and came of age in Post-WWI Tokyo, Tian Han, like others in his generation, had been shaped by the defining wars in the region and throughout the world, among them the First Sino-Japanese War seemed to have had the most profound impact on his generation. Subtitled as “The first in a trilogy on the First Sino-Japanese War,” Storms over Choson featured events taken place in the imperial palace, the Japanese consulate, and the suburbs of Hanseong (漢城, now Seoul), in the official residence of Li Hongzhang in Tianjin, in the imperial court in Beijing, and in a village in the French Indochina (now Vietnam) from the early to mid 1880s at the time of the Sino-French conflict, and was crafted as a prologue to another two future plays on the First Sino-Japanese War fought over Choson Dynasty Korea (now divided into North and South Korea). Intriguingly, in his fictional account written in 1948 on the diplomatic dramas and political intrigues among Qing China, Meiji Japan, Choson Dynasty Korea, Imperial Russia, the French Third Republic, and French Indochina, Tian Han quotes Chen Gonglu’s 陳恭祿 Zhongguo jindaishi 中國近代史, a well-researched and well-written account of Chinese history from the mid-19th century onward, as an important source. Written and published in the mid-1930s, Chen’s history has largely been forgotten in the Marxist historiography of Mainland China throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

Tian Han, in his play written at the founding of the PRC and from inside the Communist Party, quite remarkably echoed Chen’s liberal philosophy, global vision, and extraordinary sensibility towards disparate local conditions. The result is an impressively nuanced, well-balanced, multi-dimensional portrayal of the key players in Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam, France, and Russia, though still from a distinctively Chinese perspective. Such an important historical play, like the historical account that inspired it, has long been forgotten in the historiography of modern Chinese theatre. Its excavation and possible (re)staging in today’s increasingly interconnected world reveal important historical precedents of intra-Asian border-crossing in the “East Asian Cultural Sphere,” and could inspire readers and audiences to further reflect on the multiple and intertwined paths of cultural flows among China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond, both historically and in contemporary times.

第二屆韓國世界華文文學國際研討會，韓國全南國立大學麗水校區，2015年10月9日

第八屆中華名作家邀請國際論壇 “嚴歌苓文學與世界的對話” 發言初稿，2015年10月8日，韓國外國語大學 Global Campus (龍仁校區）工學館207號

Conference presentation prepared for “Visual Representations, World Literature and the Left-wing ... more Conference presentation prepared for “Visual Representations, World Literature and the Left-wing Cosmopolitanism in Modern China and East Asia,” Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 22-23, 2015

Presentation given at the third East Asian Humanities Research Forum entitled “Modern Times and M... more Presentation given at the third East Asian Humanities Research Forum entitled “Modern Times and Modernism in East Asia,” with presentations from Prof. Tsuyoshi Namigata of Kyusyu University and Prof. John Treat of Yale University, Ewha Institute for the Humanities, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, March 24, 2015.

白蛇故事的現代轉型生動地展示了文本與視覺藝術如何在現實中獲得生命，並在日常生活、精神塑造、和文化轉型中發揮重要作用。

This presentation offers close readings of key White Snake texts with an emphasis on gender ambig... more This presentation offers close readings of key White Snake texts with an emphasis on gender ambiguities and role reversals central to these texts’ metamorphoses. These texts include the Tang legends Li Huang and Jiyi ji as recorded in Taiping guangji from the tenth century; the Song tale Xihu santa ji as collected in Qingpingshan tang huaben from the sixteenth century, Feng Menglong’s vernacular tale Bainiangzi yongzhen Leifengta from the seventeenth century and Fang Chengpei’s play Leifengta from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Preliminary research suggests that the Tang legends recorded in the tenth century already provide ample room for gender experimentation: Li Huang tells a story of how a young man was bewitched by a white snake and as a consequence, his body melted into water and he died a horrible death; while Jiyi ji in the same Taiping guangji collection recounts how a young man clothed in white was discovered to be the snake who seduced the daughter of the family. White Snake’s gender ambiguity was a truly prominent feature of the early iterations of the tale. The transgressive spirit of the Tang legends is echoed in the post-modern revamping of the tales centered on Green Snake from the early 1990s onwards, recasting her as an androgynous female protagonist. The modernity of the Tang reminds us the importance of tracing gender transgressions in the early metamorphoses of the White Snake legend.

As a transnational agent of avant-garde documentary and international socialism, Dutch filmmaker ... more As a transnational agent of avant-garde documentary and international socialism, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens connected interwar European avant-garde with socialist cultural production in East Berlin, Paris, and Beijing. Before his departure for Paris in 1957, Ivens was orchestrating documentary films on international women’s and workers' movements in East Berlin, collaborating with Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Pablo Picasso across the “Iron Curtain.” His documentary Zao chun (Before Spring, or Lettres de Chine), shot in China and narrated in Chinese, produced by the CNDFS in Beijing in 1958, brings to mind Chris Marker’s landmark work Lettre de Sibérie (and Dimanche à Pékin) made around the same time, as well as Ivens’s own poetic love letter to Paris, La Seine a rencontré Paris, an award-winning documentary made right before his departure from Paris for Beijing.

Joris Ivens and his generation of interwar international avant-gardists such as Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Sergei Eisenstein, Yokomitsu Riichi, Federico García Lorca, and Tian Han were active in Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Madrid, and Shanghai at the post-WWI moment. For those who survived WWII, they became key players in the field of cultural production in East Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York, and Beijing. This paper presents Joris Ivens and his contemporary international avant-gardists as protagonists in a shared political and cultural struggle from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War, and probes their legacies for today’s interconnected world.

This talk is centered on three parts. In Part I, I explore the intimate relationship between inte... more This talk is centered on three parts. In Part I, I explore the intimate relationship between intermediality and the avant-garde. Part II uses Hong Shen and Tian Han’s interconnected biography to highlight the dialectic relationship between the avant-garde and the popular. Part III zooms in a few key moments in Hong Shen’s intermedial art and activism in a truly transnational modern mediasphere, including the intermedial and international travels of Lady Windermere’s Fan; the naming of Huaju; and Hong’s intermedial activism against Shanghai Express and in directing the Marco Polo Bridge. I conclude by briefly analyzing how The Wedded Husband and Shanghai Old and New best represent such intermediality.

This talk examines Tian Han’s plays “Lingguang” (“Spiritual Light”) and “Muqin” (“Mother”) in the... more This talk examines Tian Han’s plays “Lingguang” (“Spiritual Light”) and “Muqin” (“Mother”) in the context of interwar socialist avant-garde and left-wing cosmopolitanism. A Christian anarchist cosmopolitanism propelled Tian Han and his generation of interwar avant-garde to search for alternative cultural resources, which led them to a cluster of shared cultural texts in a broad socialist context and the performance of “Spiritual Light” in Tokyo in 1920. The flowering of left-wing cosmopolitanism in Shanghai in the 1930s, in particular, Tian Han’s rewriting of Maxim Gorky’s novel Мать (The Mother) as a one-act play in Shanghai in 1932, must be understood in the context of “Spiritual Light” and the Christian anarchist cosmopolitanism of post-WWI Tokyo.

"Five cinematic representations of the legend of the White Snake from Hong Kong and Japan (Byaku ... more "Five cinematic representations of the legend of the White Snake from Hong Kong and Japan (Byaku fujin no yoren, starring Yamaguchi Yoshiko, Shaw Brothers and Toho Company, 1956), Japan (Hakuja den, Tõei Animation, 1958), Hong Kong (Baishe zhuan, Shaw Brothers, starring Lin Dai, 1962), Taiwan (Baishe danao tiangong, dir. Sun Yang, starring Jia Ling, 1975), and Mainland China (Baishe zhuan, Shanghai Film Studio, starring Li Bingshu, 1980) frame this paper. The theatrical and cinematic performances of the Chinese folk tale were represented in the diverse genres of costume drama, animation, Huangmei Opera film, Kung Fu film/slapstick comedy, and Peking Opera film. This paper examines the five cinematic texts as sites for productive conversations among performance, politics, and popularity from the end of World War Two to the end of the Cultural Revolution throughout Cold War East Asia.

The Hong Kong and Japan co-production from 1956 and the Japanese animation from 1958 can be read together under the rubric of “art of reconciliation.” They attempted to use beautiful artistry to dissolve conflicts rather than highlighting “main contradictions,” as was the case in the Peking Opera version finalized by Tian Han in Mainland China a few years prior. The Japanese attempts at representing the White Snake as a beautiful enchantress in full color and feature length, and having it widely distributed in the United States and Europe, in particular, demonstrated the delicate balancing act initiated by the Japanese towards China, US, and Europe at the height of the Cold War. The high-tech features went hand in hand with the film’s political relevance and its market viability. The controversial Manchuria-born Japanese actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, known for her impersonating Chinese women under her Chinese name Li Xianglan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, returned to the role of another “Chinese” woman, this time a snake spirit, as part of her Japanese/Hong Kong film career revival in the postwar context.

The Hong Kong version from the early 1960s and the Taiwanese version of the mid 1970s could be understood in the context of commercial melodrama, with a strong tendency to demystify, humanize, and eroticize the image of the White Snake. The Shaw Brothers, who collaborated with the Toho Company in Japan to produce the 1956 film, attempted to use the Huangmei Opera film with the glamorous Lin Dai in the title role to launch a new commercial venture in the 1960s. In the Taiwanese production of the mid 1970s, a martial arts film resembling a slapstick comedy, the comical and the erotic similarly came together to transform magic into melodrama.

The Mainland version conditioned by the immediate post-Cultural Revolution moment quite faithfully followed Tian Han’s mid-1950’s Peking Opera text of the White Snake story. However, as one of the first feature films from the PRC in the early 1980s, its high caliber Peking Opera performance, its high-tech special effect, together with its emphasis on gender and class politics from the bottom up, recreated a new canon through a much maligned genre in the post-Cultural Revolution context.
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This talk opens with an analysis of the intersection of Christianity, romanticism, feminism, and ... more This talk opens with an analysis of the intersection of Christianity, romanticism, feminism, and socialism as embodied in the image of a female Faust in Tian Han's play "Lingguang" (Tokyo, 1920). The spatial politics of the Asia Pacific at the post-WWI moment helps to locate the Japanese imperial capital Tokyo as a spiritual, cultural and political frontier of modern China. The Christian and Wilsonian contexts that conditioned the play point to an American-style social gospel and a new "Americanism," which provides a clue to understand the American setting of the play. Tian Han's explorations in spirituality, performance and politics brought him to socialism and an ethical critique of socialism at the same time. The interpenetration of Christianity, romanticism, feminism, and socialism in Tian Han's 1920 Tokyo play reveals the rich historical and geopolitical manifestations of the May Fourth Movement. It brings spirituality into a dialogue with "science" and resituates radical politics in the context of a passionate pursuit of "democracy." The emphasis on social salvation reinstitutes a spiritual dimension in cultural and political practices and reveals the dynamic currents among spirituality, performance, and politics before they became fixed categories in the historiography of modern China.

In Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, the triumphal patriotic narrati... more In Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, the triumphal patriotic narrative so pervasive in Chinese cultural productions throughout the twentieth century, came to a gloomy end. The Chinese student activists who plotted to assassinate a Japanese collaborator during the Second Sino-Japanese War were betrayed by one of their own and were executed together. If the legendary Shanghai writer Eileen Chang, writing the original story in Hong Kong and in the United States, was deconstructing nationalism in the midst of Cold War politics, Ang Lee’s twenty-first century cinematic contemplation was saturated with his unique perspective as a Taiwanese director of Mainland origin, established in Hollywood, who had international capital and talent at his disposal to reflect on this controversial yet defining moment in modern Chinese culture and politics. The world of politics and the world of performance are constantly interpenetrating in Lust, Caution. Performance becomes the means and the end, a sensitive crystallization of the mentality and practice of a generation of young people seeking to unleash their patriotic and sexual desires. Musical form, as expressed in performance and role-play, is related in an intimate way to social form, to the integration of individual bodies into a social body. This presentation examines the fascinating afterlife of two popular songs from the 1930s’ Shanghai in this 2007 film. It proposes to read this twenty-first century visual text as an epilogue to an enduring narrative highlighting the intersection of performance, politics, and popularity throughout twentieth-century China.

《武汉大学学报》第64卷第6期, Nov 2011

Constellation Theatre Company, Washington D.C., May 11 at 4 pm., 2019

CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature

This is a performance review of the Constellation Theatre Company (CTC)’s 2019 D.C. production of... more This is a performance review of the Constellation Theatre Company (CTC)’s 2019 D.C. production of The White Snake, written and originally directed by Mary Zimmerman in 2012. This review connects the 2019 CTC production with the 2014 performance of the same Zimmerman play, directed by Zimmerman herself on site at the Second Wuzhen Theatre Festival in Wuzhen, China. It further traces a key inspiration of the 2012 Zimmerman play to Chinese writer Zhao Qingge’s 1956 novel Baishe zhuan (The Legend of the White Snake), which was itself a product of the cultural politics of the Chinese 1950s and much longer oral, written, and performance traditions.

Theatre Journal, 2015

Chapter 5 is a close reading of director Kirti Jain’s 2001 theatre piece Aur Kitne Tukde, a play ... more Chapter 5 is a close reading of director Kirti Jain’s 2001 theatre piece Aur Kitne Tukde, a play that offers redress for the exclusion of women’s trauma in master narratives of partition. Jain’s adaptation of oral histories and short stories catalogs sexual violence against women done in the name of national differentiation. Menon’s description of the symbolic props, sonic elements, and narrative twists represents Jain’s play as a complex and critical restorying of women’s writing of partition. Coupled with Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (2000), which provided some material for the play, this chapter would serve as an excellent text to teach the adaptation of nonfiction. Menon closes with a brief analysis of literary representations of sexual violence against men, reiterating that the physical body, and not just the psyche or national imaginary, is subject to lasting trauma.