Tuesday, Jul 03, 2012

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China and Shakespeare: Icons for a Post-National Age

Join us when visiting scholar Dr Alexander Huang author of Chinese Shakespeare's speaks at Asia Bookroom on Tuesday July 3 at 6pm

About the Book

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.

Hailed by the Modern Language Association Scaglione Prize committee as "a landmark in the renewal of comparative literature as a discipline," Chinese Shakespeares examines both Shakespearean performance and Shakespeare's appearance in Chinese and 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 his 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.

Chinese Shakespeares was selected from more than 500 academic books to receive the Modern Language Association (MLA) Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize. The book also received book awards from New York University and the International Convention of Asian Scholars.

About the author

Alexander Huang is General Editor of the Shakespearean International Yearbook; Director of Dean's Scholars in Shakespeare Program and Associate Professor of English, Theatre, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.; and Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT. The recipient of the MLA Aldo and Jeane Scaglione Prize, Huang currently serves as chair of the MLA committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, Vice President of Association for Asian Performance, and Vice President of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies (MAR/AAS).


When: 6pm Tuesday, 3rd July, 2012

Where: Asia Bookroom, Unit 2, 1 - 3 Lawry Place, Macquarie. ACT

RSVP: By Monday 2nd July by phoning 6251 5191 or Email Us

Admission by gold coin donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

Don't miss this evening, but, if you can't join us on the 3rd of July but would like to buy a signed copy click here Chinese Shakespeares