Denationalizing Identities

The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora

Wah Guan Lim

• Publisher: Cornell East Asia Series
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781501776717
• eBook ISBN: 9781501774416
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Literature

Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim's study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of "Chineseness" across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

At the height of the Cold War, the "Bamboo Curtain" divided the "two Chinas" across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People's Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China's narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Articulating an Alternative Cultural Identity: Kuo Pao Kun’s Multilingual Theater Practice in Singapore
• 2. An Incomplete Break with the Past: The Remaking of Identity in Stan Lai’s Taiwanese Theater
• 3. Theater of Rebellion: Danny Yung and Experimental Hong Kong Theater
• 4. Diaspora within China: Gao Xingjian and the Theater of Exile
• Conclusion
• References
• Index