Cultural performance in China: Beyond resistance in the 1990s

Cultural performance in China: Beyond resistance in the 1990s adopts a multi-disciplinary and critical approach in engaging issues of cultural performance, global/local cultural subjectivities, and transnationalism within and between different media, including film, television, drama, fiction, and folk dance in China during the late 1990s. Theories of globalization and transnationalism, key to the dissertation's theoretical framework, are in part developed from the works of Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Rob Wilson, and Wimal Dissanayake. Theories of performativity and performance, adapted from a range of scholars (including Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Judith Butler), show how performance is an apt metaphor for cultural production in the 1990s as cultural bipolarities (e.g., local/global; official/anti-official; socialism/capitalism) are obscured by cultural hybridity.; The introduction, through a discussion of Li Yang's feature film Blind Shaft, details my rationale and goals for applying performance theory to cultural production in China. 1 Chapter 2 “Staged Ethnography in Guo Shixing's Birdman and Bad Talk Street” discusses how Guo's staging of ethnographic practices and cultural (re)presentation reveals the hybridity inscribed within a post-colonial discursive practice. Chapter 3 “The Re-cycling of Yang'ge by Senior Citizen Street Performers” illustrates how an urbanized folk dance performance provides the opportunity for individuals in a social sub-group to assert their subjectivities in a process involving imagined and real individual and social transformation. Chapter 4 “Titanic in China: Transnational Capitalism as Official Ideology?” examines the emerging synergies between commercial and official cultural practices and discourses and suggests that such complicity between official discourse, global commodification of culture, and the traffic of transnational capitalism plays a critical role in China's contemporary cultural production. Chapter 5 “Liu Heng's Garrulous Zhang: Television Performance” elucidates the hybridity of television drama production in the late 1990s.; The analysis of different literary and cultural media reveals the continuities in practices of cultural production between media. Through the integration of contemporary cultural criticism and on-site fieldwork with literary criticism, the dissertation explores the intersection of multiple social and cultural discourses and practices and develops performance as the key theory for understanding the hybridity of cultural production in China during the 1990s.