Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China by Siyuan Liu (review)

Siyuan Liu’s Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China answers two questions: What is wenmingxi? And where does it stand in Chinese theatre history? Contextualizing the questions with a historical approach from a cross-cultural perspective, Liu examines wenmingxi’s hybridization process in literature, translation, and performance, identifying it as the beginning of Chinese spoken theatre’s hybridity cycle. This book is a valuable, original, and inspiring source on the Chinese pursuit of a new theatre from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. It is a must-read for educators and students in Chinese theatre studies, (post)colonial studies, and (inter)cultural studies.

Liu adopts an efficient structure in this monograph: an introduction to establish a theoretical framework; chapters 1 and 2 addressing the background of the subject from different perspectives; a survey of wenmingxi’s development in Shanghai in chapter 3; chapters 4, 5, and 6 each focusing on one hybridization aspect; and an epilogue on the recurrence of wenmingxi’s hybridity strategies in spoken theatre of the 1940s.

The author’s search for a valid theoretical framework begins with a challenge to both the traditional/modern binary model and the theatrical interculturalism model in the study of modern Chinese theatre. Despite the former’s ideological and political advantages, it can impose a stagnant periodization problematic when examining history, and the latter—mostly applied to the last two decades of the twentieth century—often focuses on exchanges between two cultures. In his analysis of wenmingxi, Liu highlights the complexities of combining elements from Euro-American spoken theatre, Chinese indigenous theatre, and shinpa (which itself is a hybridized form of Western-style theatre and kabuki), with the hybridization processes unfolding in semicolonial China. He proposes colonial modernity as the framework for this study, because it recognizes modernization and colonialism as an “integrally connected process” (p. 5), and adopts Brian Stross’s definition of the cultural hybrid for further examination.

Based on this theoretical foundation, Liu proceeds to wenmingxi’s broader and specific background. He begins chapter 1 with the multilayered backdrop against which wenmingxi emerged. Threads woven into this backdrop include Japanese theatre reform during the 1870s–1890s as part of its modernization process, shedding light on Shintomi-za’s kabuki experiments and the rise of shinpa; the Chinese path with a parallel destination of modernization yet a separate route which eventually led them—both Chinese students and political exiles in Japan—to realize Japan’s new theatre’s power; and the Paris Opéra and French imperialist and spectacular war plays as the source of inspiration for Japanese and Chinese in terms of theatre’s role in nation building, and dramaturgical approaches in practice. In chapter 2, the author introduces the parental theatre cultures that eventually gave birth to wenmingxi: Western-style theatre in Shanghai and the Spring Willow productions beginning in 1907 by Chinese students and artists in Japan under the influence of shinpa. To explicate the influence of shinpa on the Spring Willow Society’s productions, Liu analyzes La Dame aux Camélias, Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven, Cry of Injustice, and La Tosca.

In chapter 3, Liu offers an analytical survey of wenmingxi in Shanghai during 1907–1917, with special attention to the formal and ideological hybridization process. As the chronology of important individuals, troupes, and productions unfolds, a combination of practices and approaches emerges—from the Western, the Japanese, and the Chinese performances—that include but are not limited to theater facilities, scenery design and set pieces, stage spectacle, costuming and makeup, the use of vocal techniques, and role categories. The pursuit of this new form accompanied the development of a broad range of themes, from issues in localized domestic melodrama to those in adaptations of shinpa plays based on translations of Western scripts. Concurrently, the author challenges the prevalent assertion that wenmingxi gave up its nationalist perspective for the pursuit of commercial success with a convincing discussion of nationalist plays...