Abstract
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, in semicolonial Shanghai, emerged a hybrid theatrical form that was based on Western spoken theatre, classical Chinese theatre, and a Japanese hybrid form of kabuki and Western-style spoken theatre called shinpa (new school drama). Known as wenmingxi (civilized drama), this form has, until recently, largely been ignored by scholars in China and the West as it does not fit into the current binary “traditional / modern” model in non-Western theatre and performance studies.
Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.
—Homi K. Bhabha1
Put simply, intercultural theatre is a hybrid derived from an intentional encounter between cultures and performing traditions.
—Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert2
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Notes
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
Jacqueline Lo and Helen Gilbert, “Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis,” TDR: The Drama Review 46, no. 3 (2002): 36.
See Joshua Goldstein, Drama Kings: Players and Publics in the Re-Creation of Peking Opera, 1870–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)
James R. Brandon, Kabuki’s Forgotten War: 1931–1945 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009)
James R. Brandon, “Myth and Reality: A Story of Kabuki during American Censorship, 1945–1949,” Asian Theatre Journal 23, no. 1 (2006): 1–110.
Craig Latrell, “After Appropriation,” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 4 (2000): 51.
Arthur Miller, Salesman in Beijing (New York: Viking Press, 1984).
Thomas Postlewait, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 165, 169.
See Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity (London: Japan Library, 2002)
M. Cody Poulton, Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2001)
Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan: Theater, Gender, and Nationalism (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
See Patrice Pavis, Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, trans. Loren Kruger (New York: Routledge, 1992)
Marvin Carlson, “Brook and Mnouchkine: Passage to India?,” in The Intercultural Performance Reader, ed. Patrice Pavis (New York: Routledge, 1996)
Antony Tatlow, Shakespeare, Brecht, and the Intercultural Sign (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Lo and Gilbert, “Toward a Topography.”
Among these, the hourglass model is the most widely adopted. Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins believe the hourglass model “accounts for most of the factors involved in the research, production, performance, and critical reception of intercultural theatre work.” Julie Holledge and Joanne Tompkins, Women’s Intercultural Performance (London: Routledge, 2000). 8.
For a systematic analysis of semicolonial China, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis,” in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 290–314. Until recently, the predominant view, as exemplified in Osterhammel’s article, treats Chinese semicoloniality as a special case in world colonialism. However, Richard Horowitz has convincingly demonstrated in a 2004 article that just like the Ottoman Empire and Siam, China was only part of “a fundamental infrastructure of semicolonial political systems” that Western powers imposed on non-Western nations by utilizing the so-called standard of civilization test.
See Richard S. Horowitz, “International Law and State Transformation in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History 15, no. 4 (2004): 445–86.
For the Siam experience of colonial modernity, see Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Tani E. Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 6.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 108.
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358.
Brian Stross, “The Hybrid Metaphor: From Biology to Culture,” The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 265.
Yan Zhewu and Sun Qingwen, “Zan Hong Shen zai yishu shang de shouchuang jingshen—Zhongguo huaju dianying shi shang de shige diyi” [In Praise of Hong Shen’s Artistic Creativity—Ten Firsts in the Histories of Chinese Spoken Drama and Film], Xiju yishu [Dramatic Art], 2 (1981): 67.
Hong Shen, “Daoyan” [Introduction], in Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi [A Compendium of New Chinese Literature], Vol. 9 (Drama), ed. Hong Shen (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu gongsi, 1935), 15.
Tian Han et al., Zhongguo huaju yundong wushinian shiliaoji [Documentary Materials on Fifty Years of the Chinese Spoken Drama Movement] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1958). The collection includes three volumes, with Volume One starting with an introduction by Tian Han, followed by two articles by Ouyang on the Spring Willow and wenmingxi respectively and one recollection each from Hong and Tian. The two other leaders who joined the initiative were Xia Yan and Yang Hansheng, both playwrights of the leftist dramatic movement in Shanghai of the 1930s.
Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–18.
Jean Molino, “Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language”, in The Origins of Music, ed. Nils L. Wallin and Björn Merker (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 165.
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© 2013 Siyuan Liu
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Liu, S. (2013). Introduction: Modernity, Interculturalism, and Hybridity. In: Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137306111_1
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