Dear colleagues,
I am excited to share the news of my recently published monograph, Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora (Cornell University Press, 2024).
Description:
Denationalizing Identities explores the relationship between performance and ideology in the global Sinosphere. Wah Guan Lim’s study of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian, Stan Lai Sheng-chuan, Danny Yung Ning Tsun, and Kuo Pao Kun—shows the impact of theater on ideas of “Chineseness” across China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
At the height of the Cold War, the “Bamboo Curtain” divided the “two Chinas” across the Taiwan Strait. Meanwhile, Hong Kong prepared for its handover to the People’s Republic of China and Singapore rethought Chinese education. As geopolitical tensions imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, these four dramatists wove together local, foreign, and Chinese elements in their art, challenging mainland China’s narrative of an inevitable communist outcome. By performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they debunked notions of a unified Chineseness. Denationalizing Identities highlights the key role theater and performance played in circulating people and ideas across the Chinese-speaking world, well before cross-strait relations began to thaw.
Wah Guan Lim is Associate Professor of Transcultural Chinese Theatre at National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan. He has previously taught at Bard College, New York, and the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Denationalizing Identities brings together the intellectual and creative trajectories of four major Sinophone theatre-makers. Wah Guan Lim illuminates unexplored connections between these important artists, advancing the theoretical and scholarly discussion of diaspora studies, Chineseness, and national (dis)identification.–Rossella Ferrari, author of Transnational Chinese Theatres
Denationalizing Identities is unique in its transnational scope of Chinese diasporic theater and rich in its presentation of historical backgrounds. As a well-researched and well-written book, it promises to be a significant contribution to the study of Chinese and Sinophone Theater and will also add to Chinese and Overseas Chinese studies.–E.K. Tan, author of Rethinking Chineseness
From a trickle of Chinese modernist theatre to the swell of innovative linguistic and performance styles across the 1980s Sinosphere, Lim’s work surveys key works of avant-garde theatre and their receptions across Chinese societies and global theatre. To have assembled this marvelous body of thorough scholarship is an achievement.–Edward M. Gunn Jr., author of Rendering the Regional
Posted by: Wah Guan Lim wglim@nchu.edu.tw