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  • Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the "National Drama" of China from the Late Qing to the Present by David L. Rolston
  • Colin Mackerras
Inscribing Jingju/Peking Opera: Textualization and Performance, Authorship and Censorship of the "National Drama" of China from the Late Qing to the Present. By David L. Rolston. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, Volume 12, isbn 9789004461925 (hardback), isbn 9789004463394 (e-book). Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021. xx + 797 pp. $270.00.

This is a masterly book of old-fashioned Sinology. It is thoroughly researched and uses both Chinese-language and English-language sources with equal ease. There are few researchers active today who are so much at home in both languages and their associated cultures. I very much like the style of writing. Generally speaking, it is scholarly but often quite personal and even amusing and retains the interest of the reader. As anyone can see from the number of pages, it is encyclopedic in scale and conception.

And if anybody has the qualifications to write such a book, it is David Rolston. Well known to readers of CHINOPERL as a colleague and former editor, he is master both of Chinese literature and drama, including Jingju 京劇. Through both research and direct experience, his knowledge and understanding of his subject is unparalleled.

When I say this book is old-fashioned Sinology, I have in mind two main factors. One is the extreme detail, lists of books, the enormous attention to footnotes, and their length. The second is that there is comparatively little attention to theory. Toward the end of the preface (p. xv), the author tells us he does not feel obliged to "theorize," because this book is unique in the literature so far. He believes "common sense" is more useful. I think he has a point. Theorizing can become a kind of fetish in scholarly literature. Moreover, there is a school of thought that believes that theorizing can be equivalent to imposing a Western framework on non-Western forms of scholarship, philosophy, or arts. Perhaps it is better to research Jingju in its own terms, rather than Western.

But I do have the feeling that issues like censorship, which is highlighted in the title, could be usefully theorized a bit more than Rolston thinks necessary. There is a great deal about censorship in this book, but not much about the theory of censorship. There is, for example, not much explanation of the different kinds of censorship and the theories that have been proposed to explain them. On the other hand, though this book may lack theory, it is replete with ideas and analysis. Rolston's skepticism about theory is no indication at all of paucity of ideas.

And I may add that, though this book definitely does see Jingju in its own terms, the West and Western influence is quite present in it. There are quite a few comparisons with Western ideas and the whole idea of textualization seems to derive from the multiple ways the West impacted Chinese society and culture from the late [End Page 107] Qing on. Humiliation at the hands of the West it may have been, as the Chinese emphasize nowadays, but the influence was and still is substantial.

Although this book is so scholarly, it is also quite personal in many places. For instance, in the preface he tells us a good deal about the personal experiences that made him interested enough in Chinese indigenous theater to make him want to dedicate much of his life to studying it. He says he "fell in love with xiqu 戲曲 (Chinese indigenous theater) and with its most influential form, Jingju, in particular" (p. ix). He tells us his experiences as a student in Taiwan and his regular visits to Beijing, and even that the reason why he chose to study the texts, rather than the music, was because of a mild hearing disability.

Rolston sums up the essence of his research in the first paragraph. He writes: "This book focuses on the processes by which this theatrical tradition [Jingju/Peking opera] became textualized" (p. ix). Why this matters is because Jingju was best known "as...

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