Chinese Shakespeares

Huang has tackled one of the most exciting areas in Chinese and comparative cultural studies. Seen through the prism of Chinese encounters with Shakespeare and Shakespearean theatre, his book covers a wide range of issues: the dynamics of transculturation, the technology of media and reproduction, and the politics of theater. Chinese Shakespeares is a fascinating study of how, throughout the crucial moments in modern history, the Chinese imagined, appropriated, and re-oriented Shakespeare. -- David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University, and author of The Monster That Is History Chinese Shakespeares is a theoretically sophisticated contribution to crosscultural adaptation studies, not to mention Shakespeare studies. It asks (and answers) the questions that do full justice to the complexity--historical, political, cultural, social, and aesthetic--of indigenizing Shakespeare in the multiple Chinese literary and performance cultures from the first Opium War to our own times. -- Linda Hutcheon, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, and author of A Theory of Adaptation Huang brilliantly demonstrates the extent to which East Asia explores its fascination with Shakespeare in fiction, theater, opera, cinema, and popular culture, and conversely the extent to which the rest of the world has absorbed Chinese theatrical idioms and practices. If Shakespeare proverbially belongs to the whole world, we can also gain invaluable insight from this study as to how a paradoxical sense of belonging and betrayal is configured chronologically and spatially. Imaginations about China function in Shakespearean performances in mainland China, in Taiwan, and around the globe. What Walter Benjamin has called 'the aestheticization of politics' becomes here the focus of an absorbing and unforgettable account. -- David Bevington, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago, author of Shakespeare: The Seven Ages of Human Experience Anyone interested in modern and contemporary China and its performance culture in global contexts must read this book. Huang has gone where few have gone before: the reception and performance of Shakespeare in the Chinese-speaking world during the twentieth century. With insightful analysis of intercultural relationships and East-West comparative theater studies, this meticulous and thorough study breaks new ground in the understanding of Chinese performance culture. -- Xiaomei Chen, professor of Chinese literature, University of California, Davis, and author of Occidentalism and Acting the Right Part Astonishing in breadth and depth, this study establishes Alexander C. Y. Huang as the world's preeminent authority on Chinese Shakespeares. Its theoretical sophistication and careful analysis of Chinese adaptations in global and local contexts set a new standard for the topic that is not likely to be equaled for decades. This is the book that so many of us have been waiting for, surpassing everything on the topic with its sustained theoretical reflection on the dynamics of intercultural appropriation, its depth of research into Chinese texts, and its command of both Shakespeare scholarship as well as the most recent criticism on intercultural performance. -- Timothy Billings, Middlebury College, and author of Glossing Shakespeare: Reading the Plays from the Bottom of the Page Chinese Shakespeares is not just another book on Shakespeare. It is a very absorbing account of intercultural appropriations and engagements that spans a century and a half of cultural flows across the Sinophone world and beyond. Written in a fluid and lucid prose, the book contributes to our understanding of the evolving patterns of globalization and localization in the realm of art, culture, and intellectual subjectivity. -- Haiyan Lee, Stanford University, author of Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950 This book makes not only a groundbreaking but formative contribution to what is at this time a newly-emerging field of study in the English-speaking world. No one working in this field in the future will be able to proceed without seriously reckoning with all that Alexander C. Y. Huang has put into play. -- Tom Cartelli, Muhlenberg College, and coauthor of New Wave Shakespear on Screen Chinese Shakespeares demonstrates why the study of Shakespeare in Chinese contexts is a vital topic of such significance... [Huang's] meticulously researched and thoughtfully constructed study... has turned this skeptic into a believer, and I invite any scholar who is interested -- or not interested -- in this topic to read Huang's thought-provoking volume. -- John B. Weinstein Journal of Asian Studies

For close to two hundred years, the ideas of Shakespeare have inspired incredible work in the literature, fiction, theater, and cinema of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. From the novels of Lao She and Lin Shu to Lu Xun's search for a Chinese "Shakespeare," and from Feng Xiaogang's martial arts films to labor camp memoirs, Soviet-Chinese theater, Chinese opera in Europe, and silent film, Shakespeare has been put to work in unexpected places, yielding a rich trove of transnational imagery and paradoxical citations in popular and political culture. Chinese Shakespeares is the first book to concentrate on both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's appearance in Sinophone culture and their ambiguous relationship to the postcolonial question. Substantiated by case studies of major cultural events and texts from the first Opium War in 1839 to our times, Chinese Shakespeares theorizes competing visions of "China" and "Shakespeare" in the global cultural marketplace and challenges the logic of fidelity-based criticism and the myth of cultural exclusivity. In her critique of the locality and ideological investments of authenticity in nationalism, modernity, Marxism, and personal identities, Huang reveals the truly transformative power of Chinese Shakespeares.