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Exhibition Video curator, Imagining China, Folger Library, Washington, D.C., September 17, 2009 ~ January 9, 2010 (curator: Timothy Billings)
MAR-AAS annual conference, October 22-24, 2010 Penn State University, University Park, PA
Links to Global Shakespeare Adaptations
Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective, special issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Alex Huang Essays on The Banquet (Ye Yan, China, 2006; based on Hamlet) and/or Maqbool (India, 2003; based on Macbeth) are invited. The films, with English subtitles, have been released on DVD. The review cluster is an innovative forum for performance reviews that provide contrasting perspectives on the same films or productions. The journal encourages contributors to use the online and multimedia format to its best advantage. The cluster editor and the journal's technical support team will be happy to prepare clips from the two films to accompany the reviews.
Panel: "Tears and Laughter in Asian Comedy" This panel investigates the political implications of tears and laughter in East Asian performance and literary cultures in the contexts of Republican China in the 1920s, Korea and Japan in the 1930s, and contemporary China. The papers will examine the politics and rhetorics of East Asian comedic forms. What do the audiences laugh at? How do comedies provoke laughter and tears? The panel will draw broadly upon theories of comedy in relation to expressions of humor on stage, on screen, and in literature.
Research Seminar: "Asian Shakespeares in Europe" From Ariane Mnouchkine's controversial "Orientalised" Richard II in 1981 to Kenneth Branagh's Japanese-inflected As You Like It in 2006, from Yukio Ninagawa's Kabuki-Macbeth at the Edinburgh Festival in 1985 to Eugenio Barba's and Ong Keng Sen's adaptations of Hamlet with Euro-Asian casts at the Kronborg castle's Hamlet Sommer festival (2006; 2002), and from the Kathakali King Lear at the London Globe in 1999 to David Tse's bilingual King Lear at the RSC Complete Works festival in 2006, there is a rich history of interactions between Shakespeare performance and Asian idioms in Europe. The recent influx of artists of Asian descent (such as Prague-based Noriyuki Sawa) into Great Britain and Western Europe has fuelled cross-cultural blending, imposition, and appropriation. Whether "made in Europe" or "imported from Asia," these performances have compelled Anglo-European audiences to negotiate the unfamiliar and foreign forms of the familiar and "local" canon that is Shakespeare.
AAS, Chicago, March 26-29, 2009 Panel: "Parodic China: Subversion and Mockery in Modern Chinese Entertainment Culture" From Lu Xun's Old Stories Retold to the e'gao spoofs of the blogosphere, parody has been a popular mode of experiencing the modern world across a wide swath of Chinese literary and mass culture. When have Chinese parodies had a measurable bite, and when have they contained (and thus delimited) the power of their own critique? This panel probes questions provoked by the parodic forms in modern Chinese entertainment culture. This panel will examine the parody phenomenon from historical, textual, and comparative angles, digging into its historical antecedents in the May Fourth era and contemporary variations. The three papers explore how parody has shaped and been shaped by China'ss literary, cinematic, and Internet arenas. From different perspectives, the panelists will consider what compels and is compelling about modern Chinese parody and when the use of the parodic mode is a mark of innovation or, conversely, a symptom of creative fatigue.
 AAS, Atlanta, April 4-6, 2008 Familial and Cultural Circuits of Chinese Literary Identities Modern Chinese literary identities are part and parcel of the writers' emotional attachment to--or strategic severance from--different forms of cultural values, such as family and collective cultural memory. The purpose of this panel is to bring into dialogue four intersecting projects on these issues in the cinema and literature of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
ATHE, New Orleans, July 26-29, 2007 Roundtable: "Speak of me as I am": Remembering Shakespeare and Post/colonial Asia Shakespeare in Asia has become a significant site of collective cultural memory and post/colonial experiences. This roundtable explores a new set of questions generated by Shakespeare's presence in the undertheorized intercultural field of East and Southeast Asia. A diverse range of directors and scholars of Asian theater examine the fault line of politics and aesthetics, memory and history, focusing on regional multicultural Shakespeare performances in the Philippines, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
SAA, San Diego, April 5-7, 2007 Seminar: Shakespeare, Appropriation, and the Ethical In what ways have the fields of Shakespearean interpretation, appropriation, translation, performance (film, theatre, online, TV, in English and worldwide, then and now) been informed by ethical questions? Are there patterns in the invocation of ethical concerns? What resources are available in critical theory that we might bring to bear on ethics and questions of authority, authenticity, and aesthetics? Participants may address these theoretical and other relevant questions, or problematize the ethical presumptions of all modes of confrontations including literary criticism as an act of appropriation.
AAS, San Francisco, April 6-9, 2006 Panel: "Found in Translation: Rethinking the Foreign in East Asian Modernities" It is said that colonial modernities are translated modernities. In recent decades, postcolonial theory has given us powerful conceptual tools to think about literary modernities in East Asia, but the status of the foreign remains poorly conceptualized. How does the colonial other become the colonized self? What role have exoticism and Occidentalism played in the making of East Asian social imaginaries? What counts as “foreign” under postcolonial conditions and in the age of globalization? This panel seeks to rethink the problematic status of the foreign in the invention of modern vernacular fiction, lyrical poetry, spoken drama, and park culture in Japan, Korea, and China.
Seminar: Performing Imperialism and Cultural Otherness in Modern East Asia Modern East Asian drama and performance cultures (including Chinese huaju and xiqu, Japanese Takarazuka and shingeki, South Korean shinguk, and film from all three cultures) are arguably the products of military conflicts, responses to (cultural) imperialism, and the urgent need of these nations to re-invent their relationships to each other and to the West in light of rapidly changing contemporary realities. This research seminar explores such questions as: Is there a critical vocabulary particular to East Asian performance, beyond the basics of comparative drama and film studies? Conversely, how has East Asia figured in the comparative study of cultures? Are the tools of Western critical theory relevant to these cultures, or might they be re-inscriptions of cultural imperialism?
Shakespeare in Asia International Conference
Digital Humanities Projects (past)
Shakespearean Orients, Early Modern to Postmodern This book examines the references to Asian identities, goods, and locations in Shakespeare's plays, as well as the production and reception of the knowable and unknowable racial Others in modern and postmodern performances. It argues that both the technologies of knowing selected aspects of Asia and the cultural production of ignorance (through deliberate or inadvertent neglect) are part of the compensatory strategies that were used to sittuate early modern Europe in an Asia-dominated world economy, and Shakespeare in our globaizing world. Reconfigured Localities: Translation, Transnationalism, Travel Why do travelogues and translations frequently function allegorically? What is the relationship between abstract cultural roots and lived experiences in travel? Liang Qichao's travel narratives, ambassador Guo Songtao's diaries, and Lin Shu's ambitious translation projects construct "China" and the European West as two discursive modes through which different sets of values are articulated.
While Hamlet--in Wieland's and Wilhelm's reworking--is the Enlightenment model of nobility, Wilhelm embodies Goethe's idea of Strum und Drang sensibility. Theatre becomes the ultimate site for Wilhelm's self realization, and producing and performing in Hamlet becomes his ultimate challenge crossing from fiction to reality and back. Lu Xun and the Invention of the "Tragic" in Modern Chinese Literature As an unfamiliar yet poignant voice in the literary traditions of China, Lu Xun's writings epitomize the emergence of a tragic consciousness in the modern Chinese literary landscape. His prose poems in Yecao (Weeds , 1927) and short stories from Gushi xinbian (Old Stories Retold, 1927) contain a peculiar picture of darkness. He has invented a modern tragic consciousness through his rendition and mixture of three modes: the satiric mode, youhua (the playful, facetious mode) and the tragic mode. Wartime Shakespeare on Stage and Screen Wars often shape and filter the production and reception of Shakespeare, forming an important force in the transmission of ideologies. This tendency is especially evident in stage and screen adaptations of Shakespeare in England during the Second World War, where the processes of politicizing and depoliticizing Shakespeare are shaped by three decades of cultural politics. Performing Cultural Otherness in Early Modern England This project examines travel narratives and plays that deal with foreigners in early modern England. These texts share similar anxieties over the unfamiliar "Other" that arrive with the rapid expansions of horizons--geographically and culturally. Every homebound ship (or privateer) to London--with ambassadors, aristocratic travelers, sailors, and pirates on board--brings news of captivity, redemption, renegades, and wonders of unknown worlds. Since the East meant spices and gold, the European orientalists introduced the globe to their majesties with an agenda to enrich their country's material wealth. The Dialectic between the Local and the Global in Lao She The Two Mas and other works by Lao She dramatize the dialectic between the global and the local and asks whether we can ever refuse to be defined by the local, either by birth or by acculturation. These narratives are informed by tropes of cultural diversity and pluralism.
POCI: Proficiency-Oriented Chinese Instruction PSU Summer Program in Shanghai
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