Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the "National Drama" of China from the Late Qing to the Present by David L. Rolston (review)

Abstract

This is a masterly book of old-fashioned Sinology. It is thoroughly researched and uses both Chinese-language and English-language sources with equal ease. There are few researchers active today who are so much at home in both languages and their associated cultures. I very much like the style of writing. Generally speaking, it is scholarly but often quite personal and even amusing and retains the interest of the reader. As anyone can see from the number of pages, it is encyclopedic in scale and conception. And if anybody has the qualifications to write such a book, it is David Rolston. Well known to readers of CHINOPERL as a colleague and former editor, he is master both of Chinese literature and drama, including Jingju 京劇. Through both research and direct experience, his knowledge and understanding of his subject is unparalleled. When I say this book is old-fashioned Sinology, I have in mind two main factors. One is the extreme detail, lists of books, the enormous attention to footnotes, and their length. The second is that there is comparatively little attention to theory. Toward the end of the preface (p. xv), the author tells us he does not feel obliged to “theorize,” because this book is unique in the literature so far. He believes “common sense” is more useful. I think he has a point. Theorizing can become a kind of fetish in scholarly literature. Moreover, there is a school of thought that believes that theorizing can be equivalent to imposing a Western framework on non-Western forms of scholarship, philosophy, or arts. Perhaps it is better to research Jingju in its own terms, rather than Western. But I do have the feeling that issues like censorship, which is highlighted in the title, could be usefully theorized a bit more than Rolston thinks necessary. There is a great deal about censorship in this book, but not much about the theory of censorship. There is, for example, not much explanation of the different kinds of censorship and the theories that have been proposed to explain them. On the other hand, though this book may lack theory, it is replete with ideas and analysis. Rolston’s skepticism about theory is no indication at all of paucity of ideas. And I may add that, though this book definitely does see Jingju in its own terms, the West and Western influence is quite present in it. There are quite a few comparisons with Western ideas and the whole idea of textualization seems to derive from the multiple ways the West impacted Chinese society and culture from the late CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature 41.1 (July 2022): 107–114