The READCHINA project is happy to invite you to an upcoming talk by Nick Stember (University of Cambridge) on Tuesday November 9, 2021, at 10:00 (Freiburg time). The talk will be held online via Zoom; to receive a link, please register by sending an email to readchina.erc@gmail.com.
The abstract of the talk follows below:
Impossible Futures: A Chinese Star Wars
Although Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) was released to much fanfare in both Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1980 to this day it has never been given a general release in the People’s Republic of China. As an editorial in People’s Daily at the time explained, the film’s popularity was evidence that “the entirety of capitalist culture”整个资本主义文化 was “tottering and rotten to the core” 腐朽没落. Surprisingly, however, the film did reach a wide audience within China in the 1980s, albeit through what we might call the “paper cinema” 纸上观影—unlicensed illustrated adaptations in film journals, pictorials (huabao), and comic books (lianhuanhua), beginning in early 1979. Even more striking is the fact that many of these were published under the banner of “science popularization” 科学普及 in explicit support of Deng Xiaoping’s so-called “Four Modernizations” 四个现代化. In this talk, I will focus on one widely circulated comic book adaptation of the first two Star Wars films, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Published in two-parts in December 1980 and August 1982 by the Guangzhou branch of Science Popularization Press 科学普及出版社, this adaptation found a second life online in 2014, when it was scanned and posted online by the cultural historian Maggie Greene, with an English translation appearing shortly thereafter. As I will argue, comics like these suggest new avenues for research into the reproduction and reception of the culture of American science fiction at the birth of the Reform-era, with the United States providing an example of futures both possible and impossible.
Nick Stember is a translator and historian of Chinese popular culture, currently writing his PhD dissertation on science fiction in post-Cultural Revolution lianhuanhua in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Thanks and see you soon,
The READCHINA Team
Many thanks and best greetings,
Damian Mandzunowski