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BestsellerE-book
Author Chen, Xiaomei, 1954- author.

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

Publication Info. New York : Columbia University Press, [2017]
©2017

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xii, 363 pages) : illustrations
text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Introduction: Propaganda performance, history, and landscape -- The place of Chen Duxiu: political theater, dramatic history, and the question of representation -- Returning a people's hero: a "new" legacy in the plays of Mao -- Staging Deng Xiaoping: the "incorrigible capitalist roader" -- Performing the "red classics": three revolutionary music-and-dance epics and their peaceful restorations -- Epilogue: Where are the "founding mothers"?
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.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject China -- History -- 1949- -- Historiography.
China.
History.
Chronological Term 1949-
Subject Historiography.
Theater -- Political aspects -- China -- History -- 20th century.
Theater -- Political aspects.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Heads of state -- China -- Biography.
Heads of state.
Genre/Form Biographies.
Subject Biography -- Political aspects.
Biography.
China -- Politics and government -- 1949- -- Biography.
Politics and government.
Chronological Term Since 1900
Genre/Form Electronic books.
History.
Electronic books.
Biographies.
Other Form: Print version: Chen, Xiaomei, 1954- Staging Chinese Revolution. New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] 9780231166386 (DLC) 2015042459 (OCoLC)935493379
ISBN 9780231541619 (electronic book)
0231541619 (electronic book)
9780231166386 (cloth ; alkaline paper)
0231166389
9780231166386