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;rdquo; 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 propagandarsquo;s purpose into question.Chen focuses on revisionist histories that stage the lives of the “founding fathersrdquo; 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 “personalrdquo; 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.
#3757681 in eBooks 2016-09-20 2016-09-20File Name: B01LWXNNMQ
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