Wednesday Lunch Talk: ' People' vs. Antonioni: Reexamining China's Anti-propaganda in China
Presentation by Wang Yiman
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Bunche Hall, room 11377
UCLA
In 1972, Michelangelo Antonioni's documentary China, shot in China during the Cultural Revolution, became instantly controversial. It provoked an avalanche of vehement critical writings ostensibly authored by Chinese "people" of all walks of life. In 2004, China, along with some other of Antonioni's films, returned to China and received an enthusiastic reception. China and Antonioni's reversal of fate in China seem to suggest a most uncanny historical joke, one that is often conveniently
attributed to China's swing from ultra-leftism to postsocialism. This explanation, commonsensical as it is, lacks serious engagement with Antonioni's documentary and the Chinese anti-propaganda targeted at it. Dr. Wang's presentation dwells on the mechanism of each and explores why they failed to understand each other. This mutual disappointment raises larger questions about the politics of representation, especially in an uneven power field.
* * *
Yiman Wang is a Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Haverford College. She received her Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in 2003. She has published numerous book chapters and articles, invited book reviews, and she has translated books from Chinese into English and from English into Chinese. Wang currently has four papers under review. Her research and teaching interests include transnational/transregional Chinese cinemas of all periods, intra-Asian and cross-Pacific film remakes under globalization, nostalgia in post-1980s Chinese literature and culture, film adaptations of Chinese literature, pan-East Asian celebrity culture, East Asian cultural studies, and Asian American cinema. In her two most recent projects, Wang studied the effects of independent (digital) documentary production in mainland China. The purpose of the second project was to examine how the "cultural politics of nostalgia" manifest itself "in literature, cinema, and mass media in post-socialist, postcolonial China."
For more information please contact
Richard Gunde
Tel: (310) 825-8683
gunde@ucla.edu
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies
