150125 PS Postsocialist Afterlives of Socialist Performance Culture (2021S)

This seminar focuses on the production, cross-media circulation, and contemporary revival of the so-called “model works”, or “model operas” (yangbanxi 样板戏), created in the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The original core corpus of five modern Beijing operas, two ballets, and one symphony, officially proclaimed as “models” for music and performance creation in 1967, were subsequently adapted for the screen and prompted the manufacture of an array of related cultural products including graphic novels, photographs, posters, ceramics, and various memorabilia, in addition to an expanded theatrical repertoire between the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. The culture of the model works significantly shaped the collective memory of the socialist nation during the revolutionary decade and beyond, into the postsocialist era. Their legacy, moreover, persists nowadays in various forms of cultural expressions, eliciting complex aesthetic and affective phenomena encompassing critique, parody, fetishism, commoditization, nostalgia, and revival across diverse arts and media. The contemporary adaptation and circulation of these products, both nationally and transnationally, invites, therefore, a critical reconsideration of the meaning and value of cultural manifestations that are too often and too easily dismissed as simple “propaganda”, and a reflection on their continued significance.

The course will begin with a historical contextualization of the model works within Maoist revolutionary culture, before proceeding to examine their creative principles and ideological functions with respect to the politics of class, gender, ethnicity, and international relations during the Cultural Revolution. It will then take The Red Detachment of Women as a case study to examine the mechanisms of production and reproduction of the model works across genres and media in the socialist era along with various contemporary revivals, adaptations, and commentaries. The postsocialist afterlives of the model works will be scrutinized through close analysis of examples selected across the performing, visual, and screen arts (film, dance, theatre, music, installation, video, etc.) as well as popular and material culture.

Methods include contextual lectures by the course leader, reading and discussion of specialist texts and relevant critical literature, text and performance analysis, group and/or individual presentations, and individual written work. With the support of selected audio-visual materials and related scholarship, at the end of the course participants will have increased their knowledge of Chinese arts and culture in the socialist and postsocialist periods and acquired a foundation in theories of social and collective memory and approaches to cross-media and cross-cultural adaptation.