Significant Other: Staging the American in China (review)

Claire Conceison's Significant Other: Staging the American in China is a groundbreaking study of identity politics and cultural representation in Chinese theatre. Conceison illustrates practices of signification of the "foreign Other" in China through the analysis of seven contemporary spoken dramas featuring American characters or other portrayals of American culture. Indeed, as the title of this cogently argued study suggests, "the American" has often represented a very "significant Other" in Chinese international politics and popular imagination.

Specifically, Conceison addresses an "open-ended," "self-consciously temporal," and "paradoxical" practice of "othering" that she categorizes as Occidentalism (54). The complexities of the Occidentalist paradigm are expounded in chapter 1 ("Setting the Sino-American Stage") and chapter 2 ("Occidentalism (Re)considered"). Here Conceison provides the cultural-historical context and theoretical framework of her inquiry. She meticulously reassesses previous discussions of Occidentalism such as those by Edward Said, Xiaomei Chen, and James Carrier, thereby challenging dominant perceptions of both Occidentalism and its older and better-known sibling—Orientalism. She thus provides for the first time a systematic overview of the genesis and evolution of Occidentalism as a critical discourse and—most crucially—compels readers to think of it in new, thought-provoking ways.

Occidentalism is far more than a "response" to or a "reversal" of Orientalism, Conceison argues. She foregrounds Occidentalism's connection to Orientalism in terms of their relationships to the "speaking subject" and "othered object," yet rejects the notion of an East "incapable of othering" as well as conventional dichotomies of an "othering" West versus an "othered" East (50). In fact, China has long been a prolific producer of images of the foreign Other and not merely a passive victim of Orientalist scrutiny.

Referring to the widely accepted assumption that "representations of an objectified Other reveal as much, if not more, about the objectifying subject as the 'othered' object" (42), Conceison underscores the necessity of exploring the impact of such figurations on the "othered" community, contending that "such images, while articulating national and/or cultural identity [...] also do indeed speak for the Occidental Other in addition to the Oriental Self" (48). This is a decisive contribution to current conceptions of the Orientalist/Occidentalist paradigms.

Dramatic shifts in Sino-American relations occurred over the period in which the plays surveyed by Conceison were produced (1987-2002). For instance, the intensification of US-Taiwan diplomatic relations as signaled by a visit of Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui to the US in 1995 provoked indignant reactions in Beijing, for the US was seen as tacitly acknowledging Taiwan's claims to sovereignty against the Chinese mainland. Tensions between the PRC and the US heightened further following the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. These events impacted heavily on the configuration of Chinese Occidentalism, as reflected by the plays scrutinized in Conceison's book. These revealing texts operate as catalysts of the varying institutional, intellectual, and popular sentiments that surfaced in the period under examination—from the positive fascination with the American Dream prevailing in the 1980s to a proliferation of Ugly Americans taking the stage a decade later. Conceison underscores the multiple implications of such images through detailed examination of the plays and their production processes.

Chapter 3 ("Immigrant Interculturalism: China Dream") illustrates the largely optimistic perception of the American in 1980s China as expressed by Sun Huizhu and Fei Chunfang's Zhongguo meng (China Dream; 1987), an account of the interethnic romance between Mingming, a Chinese émigré to the United States, and the American Sinophile John. In contrast, Wang Peigong and Wang Gui's Da liuyang (The Great Going Abroad; 1991), discussed in chapter 4 ("Exilic Absurdism: The Great Going Abroad"), chronicles the unsettling experiences of a Chinese exile in America, which is portrayed in this instance as a land of danger and alienation. The text delves into tropes of geopathology and traumatic displacement, hence dismantling previous idealistic views of the intercultural encounter while articulating metaphors of intracultural violence. Guo Shixing's Niaoren...