Significant Other: Staging the American in China (review)

Significant Other by Claire Conceison examines the recent political history of China and the United States in relationship to representations of Americans on the Chinese stage. In her observations of Chinese spoken drama or huaju, Conceison integrates her experience as a theatre practitioner, training as a Western academic, and her field experience in Beijing and Shanghai from the mid-1980s to 2002. This multiple perspective is combined with a well-argued analysis that includes observations from several productions of the same playtext, interviews (with playwrights, actors, designers, and directors), press coverage, reviews, and casual conversations to form a comprehensive vision of Chinese attitudes towards the United States as enacted in performance. The detailed analysis of each play is written within the frame of the history of Sino-American relationships and the discourses of Orientalism and Occidentalism. The latter is the strength of the manuscript, as it provides a detailed portrait of the connection between Sino-American politics, contemporary Chinese culture, and issues of globalization.

In the initial chapter, "Setting the Sino-American Stage," Conceison positions the study within the history of the relationship between China and the United States, and more personally in her experiences as a foreigner in China. This introduction acts as an entry point to a consideration of fifteen years of Chinese-spoken drama and the specific agendas of playwrights and directors in the context of the complex twentieth-century history of Chinese culture and politics.

Following the outline of the history of Sino-Western relations in chapter 1, the author tackles the concept of Occidentalism—that is, reductive Eastern perceptions of the West—in chapter 2, "Occidentalism (Re)Considered." In a wide-ranging, sometimes circuitous discussion, Conceison argues that Occidentalism is not simply a reverse Orientalism. Referencing such authors as Edward Said, Sadik Jalal al-'Azm, J. Timothy Wixted, Frank Dikötter, Xiaomei Chen, James Carrier, and Lisa Lowe, she describes Occidentalism as an "open-ended, changing, active, and self-consciously temporal" (54) discourse that exists in paradoxical and continuous dialogue. She suggests that subjectivity in postmodernity is never stable, and instead of a theoretical focus on a unitary Occidentalism, one should reveal the possibility of divergent subjectivities, "conflicting representations," and related "contradictory approaches," including Eugene Eoyang's "four-cornered subjectivities" (54)—the conception borrowed from Chinese logic that embraces the possibility that multiple subjective identities can evolve from similar experiences. This notion emerges as the heart of her definition of Occidentalism when she operationalizes it in later chapters. Ultimately, she argues that contemporary Chinese theatre reveals the complexity of this multifaceted dialogue and its resistance to easy formulations of Occidentalism as a reverse Orientalism.

In a highly readable prose, Conceison, in chapters 3–8, analyzes the position of American characters in the plays within the changing dynamic of China's relationship to the United States. The plots of such plays as China Dream (1987) in "Immigrant Interculturalism," chapter 3; Going Abroad (1991) in "Exilic Absurdism," chapter 4; Bird Men (1993) in "Cultural Cross-Examination," chapter 5; Student Wife (1995) in "American Self-Representation," chapter 6; Dignity (1997) and Che Guevara (2000) in "Anti-Americanism," chapter 7; and Swing (2002) in "Self-Occidentalism," chapter 8, explore the issues of immigration, displacement, memory, nationalism, exile, and cross-cultural misunderstanding. The author's close reading of each play reveals the connection between the context and performance and related Chinese attitudes of ambivalence and derision towards the United States that are the result of long-standing traditions with regards to the foreign "other" and more contemporary reactions to Western policies.

Each chapter follows a consistent pattern, which begins with Conceison setting the play within its cultural moment from the personal background of the playwright and director, to the momentary political position of the United States and China. For example, Conceison, in her discussion of the Student Wife, a 1995 production of Yu Luosheng's adaptation of Wang Zhousheng's novel about a young woman who accompanies her graduate-student husband to...