Books by Liang Luo 羅靚
University of Michigan Press, 2014
University of Michigan Press, 2021
This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American p... more This documentary film project presents the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and the African American performer Paul Robeson as protagonists and highlights the internationalist and cosmopolitan forces in the making of modern Chinese culture. I continue the comparative approach introduced in my first book, in which Joris Ivens and Paul Robeson embody the tangled relationship among international avant-garde, international socialism, and Chinese revolutionary popular culture. Together with their counterparts in China, they created and disseminated Chinese revolutionary popular culture from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War. Chinese revolutionary popular culture, in turn, shaped the interwar international avant-garde and its postwar transformation.
Reviews of The Global White Snake by Liang Luo 羅靚
Intercultural Studies, 2024
Jamie J. Zhao's review of The Global White Snake
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2022
Aaron Balivet review of The Global White Snake for Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews,... more Aaron Balivet review of The Global White Snake for Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, vol. 44 (Dec. 2022), 329-333.
Asian Theatre Journal , 2022
An-Ru Chu review of The Global White Snake for Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 2 (Fall 2022),... more An-Ru Chu review of The Global White Snake for Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 39, no. 2 (Fall 2022), 414-417.
American Review of China Studies, 2022
American Review of China Studies (ARCS), peer-reviewed and biannually published, is an official j... more American Review of China Studies (ARCS), peer-reviewed and biannually published, is an official journal of the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences (ACPSS) in the United States (www.acpssus.org).
Journal of Asian Studies, 2022
Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, issue 1 (February 2022), 172-173.
Liang Luo's The Global White... more Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 81, issue 1 (February 2022), 172-173.
Liang Luo's The Global White Snake is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the "nonhuman turn" that has emerged in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book-length study to examine the remaking of the White Snake legends in the contemporary world. In her first monograph, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 1 Luo discussed the White Snake's transformations from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People's Republic of China. In The Global White Snake, Luo consciously takes a "peripheral" approach by examining the White Snake legends in spaces outside mainland China. The author's multilingual ability allows her to trace the global travels of the White Snake legends in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English productions. The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the White Snake legends, which have traveled around the world as stories of hybridity, boundary-crossing, antiauthoritarianism, and gender politics. The rest of the seven chapters are divided into three parts: "The White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," "The Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War," and "The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture." In part one, chapter 2 includes discussions of American missionary Samuel Woodbridge's and American diplomat Frederick D. Cloud's translations of the White Snake legend around the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodbridge and Cloud mistook the continuity of the White Snake legend as a sign of China's static culture. However, Luo points out that from the 1870s to the 1920s, the White Snake legend had already assumed a new life in China thanks to "technological breakthroughs in theatrical representation, shifting performative paradigms regarding gender roles, and sociopolitical debate over what was considered normative" (p. 48). In chapter 3, Luo shows how the boundary between fantasy and reality dissolved as the White Snake was released to the Chinese cultural imagination after the sensational fall of the Leifeng Pagoda in 1924. During this period, the avant-garde, the commercial, and the popular formed a concerted effort to capitalize on the pagoda's visuality. The two chapters in part two examine the inter-Asian network of the White Snake industry through a set of films, including Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953); Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren, 1956); the Japanese animation Hakujaden (which was distributed in the United States in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent); two Korean-language films, Madam White Snake (Paeksa buin, 1960) and Snake Woman (Sanyȏ, 1969); and Love of the White Snake (Paeksajȏn, 1978). Through nuanced close reading, Luo shows that "the humanity of the nonhuman continued to emerge as the central trope in White Snake adaptations throughout the Cold War" (p. 142), which served to heal the postwar trauma, as well as suture the geopolitical division in Asia. Part three contains three chapters. Chapter 6 shows how the White Snake legends transmuted into stories of resisting the institution of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and authoritarianism in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee's fiction "Green Snake" and Chinese American writer Yan Geling's "White Snake." Chapter 7 discusses the multilocational and multilingual popular cultural phenomena and media events of the White Snake legends in three Anglophone productions-Zhou Long'
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2022
Weber, Noah Arthur. “Culture Is That Which Appropriates: A Review of Liang Luo’s The Global White... more Weber, Noah Arthur. “Culture Is That Which Appropriates: A Review of Liang Luo’s The Global White Snake.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 8 Feb. 2022, chajournal.blog/2022/02/08/global-white-snake/.
Reviews of The Avant-Garde and the Popular by Liang Luo 羅靚
Asian Theatre Journal, 2019
Anne Rebull review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Asian Theatre Journal, Vol... more Anne Rebull review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Asian Theatre Journal, Volume 36, Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 509-512.
Comparative Literature & World Literature , 2017
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 2016
Review of Liang Luo, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (Michigan, 2014)
Journal of Asian Studies, 2016
TDR: The Drama Review, 2016
that Ziter covers, for instance, is not an incongruity, but speaks to the histories and politics ... more that Ziter covers, for instance, is not an incongruity, but speaks to the histories and politics of the time. Written for theatre scholars and a general readership not specialized in Middle Eastern or Arab studies, Ziter provides detailed historical and political context for the plays he analyzes. The choice to address the same plays across thematic chapters enables diverse readings of a single play, yet also lends itself to repetition and difficulty for the reader to grasp a play's meaning, as the majority are nonlinear and highly intertextual. Engaging more consistently with the field of Arabic criticism that takes up debates on national identity, performance practices, state censorship, and violence, for instance, would have enriched Ziter's discussions and maintained the complexity of his analyses within a more regional framework. As Ziter notes, the Syrian stage has been a platform for artists and activists to intervene in central debates in the Arab world and beyond. The book is a useful introduction for those interested in Syrian theatre, its themes, narrative strategies, and the wider historical and political context of its production. -Rania Jawad
Modern Drama, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 120-122.
Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde... more Modern Drama, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 120-122.
Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China
Published in Theatre Journal, Volume 67, Number 3, October 2015, pp. 584-586.
Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, 2015, 9(2): 337-344.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture , 2015
Orientierungen Zeitschrift zur Kultur Asiens, 2/2014 (26. Jg., Nr. 2)
Articles and Book Chapters by Liang Luo 羅靚
Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, 2023
This arti cle exam ines the 2019 Can ton ese opera film White Snake as an impor tant case of an e... more This arti cle exam ines the 2019 Can ton ese opera film White Snake as an impor tant case of an evolv ing "dig i tal clas si cism," mak ing use of audi encebased dig i tally pro duced and trans mit ted Chi neselan guage mate ri als, among other sources. The arti cle con tex tu al izes the Can ton ese opera film as con tinu ing the tra di tion of experimenting with the White Snake theme, using the genres of local opera and opera film, and spe cial and visual effects enabled by the newest tech nol ogy. It then moves to a close read ing of a series of danmu, anon y mous live com ments on the Can ton ese opera film trailer posted on Bilibili, as impor tant entry points for the study of audi ence par tic i pa tion in dig i tal times. The dig i tally pro duced "ink paint ing-style Chi nese aes thet ics" of the film, its dig i tal break through as a "musi cal with Chi nese char ac ter is tics," as well as var i ous forms of fan and antifan dig i tal labor trig gered by the film, pro vide fur ther evi dence on the impor tance of "the dig i tal" as "pro cesses of sense mak ing." The arti cle con cludes with thoughts on what dif fer ence "the dig i tal" might be able to make in this long his tory of representing what has become a "clas si cal" Chi nese leg end. KEYWORDS dig i tal clas si cism, Can ton ese opera film, danmu, visual effects, dig i tal fan/antifan labor
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Books by Liang Luo 羅靚
Reviews of The Global White Snake by Liang Luo 羅靚
Liang Luo's The Global White Snake is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the "nonhuman turn" that has emerged in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book-length study to examine the remaking of the White Snake legends in the contemporary world. In her first monograph, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 1 Luo discussed the White Snake's transformations from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People's Republic of China. In The Global White Snake, Luo consciously takes a "peripheral" approach by examining the White Snake legends in spaces outside mainland China. The author's multilingual ability allows her to trace the global travels of the White Snake legends in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English productions. The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the White Snake legends, which have traveled around the world as stories of hybridity, boundary-crossing, antiauthoritarianism, and gender politics. The rest of the seven chapters are divided into three parts: "The White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," "The Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War," and "The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture." In part one, chapter 2 includes discussions of American missionary Samuel Woodbridge's and American diplomat Frederick D. Cloud's translations of the White Snake legend around the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodbridge and Cloud mistook the continuity of the White Snake legend as a sign of China's static culture. However, Luo points out that from the 1870s to the 1920s, the White Snake legend had already assumed a new life in China thanks to "technological breakthroughs in theatrical representation, shifting performative paradigms regarding gender roles, and sociopolitical debate over what was considered normative" (p. 48). In chapter 3, Luo shows how the boundary between fantasy and reality dissolved as the White Snake was released to the Chinese cultural imagination after the sensational fall of the Leifeng Pagoda in 1924. During this period, the avant-garde, the commercial, and the popular formed a concerted effort to capitalize on the pagoda's visuality. The two chapters in part two examine the inter-Asian network of the White Snake industry through a set of films, including Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953); Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren, 1956); the Japanese animation Hakujaden (which was distributed in the United States in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent); two Korean-language films, Madam White Snake (Paeksa buin, 1960) and Snake Woman (Sanyȏ, 1969); and Love of the White Snake (Paeksajȏn, 1978). Through nuanced close reading, Luo shows that "the humanity of the nonhuman continued to emerge as the central trope in White Snake adaptations throughout the Cold War" (p. 142), which served to heal the postwar trauma, as well as suture the geopolitical division in Asia. Part three contains three chapters. Chapter 6 shows how the White Snake legends transmuted into stories of resisting the institution of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and authoritarianism in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee's fiction "Green Snake" and Chinese American writer Yan Geling's "White Snake." Chapter 7 discusses the multilocational and multilingual popular cultural phenomena and media events of the White Snake legends in three Anglophone productions-Zhou Long'
Reviews of The Avant-Garde and the Popular by Liang Luo 羅靚
Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China
Articles and Book Chapters by Liang Luo 羅靚
Liang Luo's The Global White Snake is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the "nonhuman turn" that has emerged in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book-length study to examine the remaking of the White Snake legends in the contemporary world. In her first monograph, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, 1 Luo discussed the White Snake's transformations from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People's Republic of China. In The Global White Snake, Luo consciously takes a "peripheral" approach by examining the White Snake legends in spaces outside mainland China. The author's multilingual ability allows her to trace the global travels of the White Snake legends in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English productions. The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the White Snake legends, which have traveled around the world as stories of hybridity, boundary-crossing, antiauthoritarianism, and gender politics. The rest of the seven chapters are divided into three parts: "The White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," "The Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War," and "The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture." In part one, chapter 2 includes discussions of American missionary Samuel Woodbridge's and American diplomat Frederick D. Cloud's translations of the White Snake legend around the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodbridge and Cloud mistook the continuity of the White Snake legend as a sign of China's static culture. However, Luo points out that from the 1870s to the 1920s, the White Snake legend had already assumed a new life in China thanks to "technological breakthroughs in theatrical representation, shifting performative paradigms regarding gender roles, and sociopolitical debate over what was considered normative" (p. 48). In chapter 3, Luo shows how the boundary between fantasy and reality dissolved as the White Snake was released to the Chinese cultural imagination after the sensational fall of the Leifeng Pagoda in 1924. During this period, the avant-garde, the commercial, and the popular formed a concerted effort to capitalize on the pagoda's visuality. The two chapters in part two examine the inter-Asian network of the White Snake industry through a set of films, including Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953); Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren, 1956); the Japanese animation Hakujaden (which was distributed in the United States in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent); two Korean-language films, Madam White Snake (Paeksa buin, 1960) and Snake Woman (Sanyȏ, 1969); and Love of the White Snake (Paeksajȏn, 1978). Through nuanced close reading, Luo shows that "the humanity of the nonhuman continued to emerge as the central trope in White Snake adaptations throughout the Cold War" (p. 142), which served to heal the postwar trauma, as well as suture the geopolitical division in Asia. Part three contains three chapters. Chapter 6 shows how the White Snake legends transmuted into stories of resisting the institution of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and authoritarianism in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee's fiction "Green Snake" and Chinese American writer Yan Geling's "White Snake." Chapter 7 discusses the multilocational and multilingual popular cultural phenomena and media events of the White Snake legends in three Anglophone productions-Zhou Long'
Siyuan Liu review of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China
［关键词］二十世纪之交; 白蛇传说; 重述; 舞台表演; 新变
D.C. production of The White Snake, written and originally directed by Mary
Zimmerman in 2012. This review connects the 2019 CTC production with the
2014 performance of the same Zimmerman play, directed by Zimmerman herself
on site at the Second Wuzhen Theatre Festival in Wuzhen, China. It further traces
a key inspiration of the 2012 Zimmerman play to Chinese writer Zhao Qingge’s
1956 novel Baishe zhuan (The Legend of the White Snake), which was itself a product
of the cultural politics of the Chinese 1950s and much longer oral, written, and
performance traditions.
摘要：本文以美国传教士吴板桥1896年对白蛇传说的英文重述《白蛇之谜》为研究对象，将其置于吴板桥传教与外交活动的语境中进行分析。作者认为吴板桥的英文白蛇译介，因其文学价值和对爱与同情的理想与实践的张扬，成为白蛇传说重述谱系中的重要文本。吴板桥的本意是以白蛇传说为例，揭露中国大众心态中的危险因素，批评佛教轮回观念及其“过时”的“动物崇拜”。但在译介过程中，吴板桥自己也成为白蛇传说的信徒，并深深为其魅力所感染。通过对深刻持久地影响了大众心态的白蛇传说的译介，他得以更深切地体会自己试图“拯救”的中国民众的心态。
2. Horror in the White Snake Tales: Sexual Encounters and Their Aftermaths
3. Horror in Early Experimental White Snake Films: the Tokyo and Shanghai Connections
4. The White Snake in Early Commercial Feature Film: Tianyi Film Company, Shanghai, 1926-7
5. Hong Kong-Japan Coproduction: Byaku fujin no yoren, Tokyo, 1956
6. Made in Hong Kong: The Shaw Brothers’ Madam White Snake, 1962
7. Connecting Hong Kong and Taiwan: The Love of the White Snake, 1978
8. Concluding Remarks: from Horrific Tales to Crowd Pleasers
Guan, Hanqing
Hong, Shen
Jiao, Juyin
Ouyang, Yuqian
Pu, Cunxin
Shi, Hui
Shu, Xiuwen
Song, Dandan
Tian, Han
Yan, Fengying
Ying, Ruocheng
Yu, Shizhi
Yuan, Xuefen
Zhu, Xu
Examining three dramatic scenes of performance in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, based on Eileen Chang’s short story of the same name, this essay proposes to read Lee’s film as an epilogue to a long-running narrative highlighting the intersection of performance and politics in twenty-century China. It argues, through a close examination of Lee’s creative use of such elements as popular music, political theater, and leftist cinema from the 1930s, that nationalism and revolution staged an intriguing comeback in Lust, Caution, intensified, rather than negated, by its intricate intertwinement with sexuality and ethics. In particular, the two popular film songs from the 1930s with lyrics penned by Tian Han quoted in the film, and their fascinating afterlives in contemporary popular culture represented by Leehom Wang, highlight the power of performance in shaping a complex range of gender, ethical, and political identities. The intersection of performance, politics, and popularity works magic throughout the film. It enables Lee’s film to go beyond Chang’s story in reinvigorating the political through the performative and the popular.
http://acas.ust.hk/2019/06/24/queering-an-icon-becoming-a-demon-a-review-of-white-snake-origins/
Born in Changsha in the late 1890s and came of age in Post-WWI Tokyo, Tian Han, like others in his generation, had been shaped by the defining wars in the region and throughout the world, among them the First Sino-Japanese War seemed to have had the most profound impact on his generation. Subtitled as “The first in a trilogy on the First Sino-Japanese War,” Storms over Choson featured events taken place in the imperial palace, the Japanese consulate, and the suburbs of Hanseong (漢城, now Seoul), in the official residence of Li Hongzhang in Tianjin, in the imperial court in Beijing, and in a village in the French Indochina (now Vietnam) from the early to mid 1880s at the time of the Sino-French conflict, and was crafted as a prologue to another two future plays on the First Sino-Japanese War fought over Choson Dynasty Korea (now divided into North and South Korea). Intriguingly, in his fictional account written in 1948 on the diplomatic dramas and political intrigues among Qing China, Meiji Japan, Choson Dynasty Korea, Imperial Russia, the French Third Republic, and French Indochina, Tian Han quotes Chen Gonglu’s 陳恭祿 Zhongguo jindaishi 中國近代史, a well-researched and well-written account of Chinese history from the mid-19th century onward, as an important source. Written and published in the mid-1930s, Chen’s history has largely been forgotten in the Marxist historiography of Mainland China throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Tian Han, in his play written at the founding of the PRC and from inside the Communist Party, quite remarkably echoed Chen’s liberal philosophy, global vision, and extraordinary sensibility towards disparate local conditions. The result is an impressively nuanced, well-balanced, multi-dimensional portrayal of the key players in Korea, China, Japan, Vietnam, France, and Russia, though still from a distinctively Chinese perspective. Such an important historical play, like the historical account that inspired it, has long been forgotten in the historiography of modern Chinese theatre. Its excavation and possible (re)staging in today’s increasingly interconnected world reveal important historical precedents of intra-Asian border-crossing in the “East Asian Cultural Sphere,” and could inspire readers and audiences to further reflect on the multiple and intertwined paths of cultural flows among China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond, both historically and in contemporary times.
Preliminary research suggests that the Tang legends recorded in the tenth century already provide ample room for gender experimentation: Li Huang tells a story of how a young man was bewitched by a white snake and as a consequence, his body melted into water and he died a horrible death; while Jiyi ji in the same Taiping guangji collection recounts how a young man clothed in white was discovered to be the snake who seduced the daughter of the family. White Snake’s gender ambiguity was a truly prominent feature of the early iterations of the tale. The transgressive spirit of the Tang legends is echoed in the post-modern revamping of the tales centered on Green Snake from the early 1990s onwards, recasting her as an androgynous female protagonist. The modernity of the Tang reminds us the importance of tracing gender transgressions in the early metamorphoses of the White Snake legend.
Joris Ivens and his generation of interwar international avant-gardists such as Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Sergei Eisenstein, Yokomitsu Riichi, Federico García Lorca, and Tian Han were active in Amsterdam, New York, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, Madrid, and Shanghai at the post-WWI moment. For those who survived WWII, they became key players in the field of cultural production in East Berlin, Moscow, Paris, New York, and Beijing. This paper presents Joris Ivens and his contemporary international avant-gardists as protagonists in a shared political and cultural struggle from the post-WWI moment to the condition of the Cold War, and probes their legacies for today’s interconnected world.
The Hong Kong and Japan co-production from 1956 and the Japanese animation from 1958 can be read together under the rubric of “art of reconciliation.” They attempted to use beautiful artistry to dissolve conflicts rather than highlighting “main contradictions,” as was the case in the Peking Opera version finalized by Tian Han in Mainland China a few years prior. The Japanese attempts at representing the White Snake as a beautiful enchantress in full color and feature length, and having it widely distributed in the United States and Europe, in particular, demonstrated the delicate balancing act initiated by the Japanese towards China, US, and Europe at the height of the Cold War. The high-tech features went hand in hand with the film’s political relevance and its market viability. The controversial Manchuria-born Japanese actress Yamaguchi Yoshiko, known for her impersonating Chinese women under her Chinese name Li Xianglan during the Second Sino-Japanese War, returned to the role of another “Chinese” woman, this time a snake spirit, as part of her Japanese/Hong Kong film career revival in the postwar context.
The Hong Kong version from the early 1960s and the Taiwanese version of the mid 1970s could be understood in the context of commercial melodrama, with a strong tendency to demystify, humanize, and eroticize the image of the White Snake. The Shaw Brothers, who collaborated with the Toho Company in Japan to produce the 1956 film, attempted to use the Huangmei Opera film with the glamorous Lin Dai in the title role to launch a new commercial venture in the 1960s. In the Taiwanese production of the mid 1970s, a martial arts film resembling a slapstick comedy, the comical and the erotic similarly came together to transform magic into melodrama.
The Mainland version conditioned by the immediate post-Cultural Revolution moment quite faithfully followed Tian Han’s mid-1950’s Peking Opera text of the White Snake story. However, as one of the first feature films from the PRC in the early 1980s, its high caliber Peking Opera performance, its high-tech special effect, together with its emphasis on gender and class politics from the bottom up, recreated a new canon through a much maligned genre in the post-Cultural Revolution context.
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