Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922321
C. Swatek
{"title":"The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China: From Dreamscapes to Theatricality","authors":"C. Swatek","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"51 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91011358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922241
Chia-ju Chang
This article uses a non-Western, scientific, and ecocritical perspective to explore the nature-cultural phenomenon of “smog life,” that is, outdoor activities taking place on a smog day, such as hiking, enjoying the fog, or practicing taiji. It presents a sharp contrast with environmentally focused, avant-garde smog art. Although avant-garde smog art is in line with today's scientific correctness by virtue of its strong commitment to activism, I believe that everyday smog life, which is viewed either as “ecoambiguous” or as “smog Ah-Q,” is in effect more subversive than its avant-garde smog art counterpart. What has undergirded smog life is a collective ecological unconsciousness—the premodern “mist” consciousness—that is suppressed in “smog modernity,” of which scientific discourse pertaining to topics such as toxic smog (mai) has become the predominant way of conceptualizing air. The author reads this suppressed mist (wu) or qi consciousness as a form of resistance against the current scientific-corrective discourse and scientism. If we situate smog life in the context of how traditional Chinese culture has been systematically marginalized in the imperialization of technological modernity, today's air-pollution-induced smog life is in actuality an invitation to explore other cognitive possibilities for air beyond the scientific. The hidden ecological consciousness and its discourse help subvert the cyberization of life and the legitimacy of an exclusive scientific epistemology as the only means of knowing.
{"title":"Life outside the Dome","authors":"Chia-ju Chang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922241","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article uses a non-Western, scientific, and ecocritical perspective to explore the nature-cultural phenomenon of “smog life,” that is, outdoor activities taking place on a smog day, such as hiking, enjoying the fog, or practicing taiji. It presents a sharp contrast with environmentally focused, avant-garde smog art. Although avant-garde smog art is in line with today's scientific correctness by virtue of its strong commitment to activism, I believe that everyday smog life, which is viewed either as “ecoambiguous” or as “smog Ah-Q,” is in effect more subversive than its avant-garde smog art counterpart. What has undergirded smog life is a collective ecological unconsciousness—the premodern “mist” consciousness—that is suppressed in “smog modernity,” of which scientific discourse pertaining to topics such as toxic smog (mai) has become the predominant way of conceptualizing air. The author reads this suppressed mist (wu) or qi consciousness as a form of resistance against the current scientific-corrective discourse and scientism. If we situate smog life in the context of how traditional Chinese culture has been systematically marginalized in the imperialization of technological modernity, today's air-pollution-induced smog life is in actuality an invitation to explore other cognitive possibilities for air beyond the scientific. The hidden ecological consciousness and its discourse help subvert the cyberization of life and the legitimacy of an exclusive scientific epistemology as the only means of knowing.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"134 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86326607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922305
L. Klein
{"title":"Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media","authors":"L. Klein","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79766319","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922177
Zhao Xin
Li Yu's two huaben stories, “A Male Mencius's Mother Raises Her Son Properly by Moving House Three Times” and “House of Gathered Refinements,” stand out from the writer's brief yet highly novel dabbling in the genre thanks to their similar concern with male same-sex desire. But rarely have the two stories been examined in tandem. Furthermore, both stories feature a shared character of a dead penetrator, which is scarcely seen in homoerotic fiction of early modern China. This article first probes factors contributing to such casualties and singles out the contestation between the monopolizing penetrators and the homoerotic public over the penetrated. It further argues that the penetrators' fatal failure in the struggle with the desiring public for the penetrated evidences consistent disapprobation of self-interested monopolization in both stories. Nonetheless, the male homoerotic public similarly suffers from frustration, being unable to keep the objects of desire due to the penetrated characters' efforts to escape from the homoerotic economy. Only successful via the mediation of state power, such eschewal in turn reveals that the homoerotic public is both vulnerable to the monopolizer's external threats and prone to collapse into possessive claims to the penetrated.
{"title":"The Death of His Husband","authors":"Zhao Xin","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922177","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Li Yu's two huaben stories, “A Male Mencius's Mother Raises Her Son Properly by Moving House Three Times” and “House of Gathered Refinements,” stand out from the writer's brief yet highly novel dabbling in the genre thanks to their similar concern with male same-sex desire. But rarely have the two stories been examined in tandem. Furthermore, both stories feature a shared character of a dead penetrator, which is scarcely seen in homoerotic fiction of early modern China. This article first probes factors contributing to such casualties and singles out the contestation between the monopolizing penetrators and the homoerotic public over the penetrated. It further argues that the penetrators' fatal failure in the struggle with the desiring public for the penetrated evidences consistent disapprobation of self-interested monopolization in both stories. Nonetheless, the male homoerotic public similarly suffers from frustration, being unable to keep the objects of desire due to the penetrated characters' efforts to escape from the homoerotic economy. Only successful via the mediation of state power, such eschewal in turn reveals that the homoerotic public is both vulnerable to the monopolizer's external threats and prone to collapse into possessive claims to the penetrated.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"19 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73786746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922289
C. Healey
{"title":"Hundred Days' Literature: Chinese Utopian Fiction at the End of Empire, 1902–1910","authors":"C. Healey","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922289","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"614 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72418691","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922193
J. Chen
This article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang's military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu's lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling's cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang's political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.
{"title":"“Queering” the Nation?","authors":"J. Chen","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922193","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang's military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu's lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling's cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang's political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89152582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922209
Bozhou Men
First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.
{"title":"Breaking the Circle","authors":"Bozhou Men","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922209","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 First appearing in 1892 as a serialized novel, Han Bangqing's Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列傳 (The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai) demonstrates the problematic of an “atypical” novel and the challenges it poses to the notion of the Chinese literary “modern.” This article examines Haishanghua's departure from the traditional circular narrative in terms of its narrative perspective, narrative time, and narrative structure and further notes that this circle-breaking pattern on the technical levels is repeated on the more profound semantic/thematic level of the novel as well. By exploring the sociohistorical context that gives rise to such modern narratives, this article draws links between Han's pioneering experimentations with Haishanghua and the rise of literary naturalism in the West. In this way, the author sheds light on the significance of this atypical novel in the periodization of the Chinese literary modern.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89531536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922217
Hazel Shu Chen
In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.
{"title":"Acoustically Embodied","authors":"Hazel Shu Chen","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922217","url":null,"abstract":"In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83230865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8922265
Neel Ahuja
The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relationships in Black studies, this essay contends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to confront the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.
{"title":"The Analogy of Race and Species in Animal Studies","authors":"Neel Ahuja","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8922265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922265","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relationships in Black studies, this essay contends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to confront the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78843405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}