CFP: Professionalism and Amateurism in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Arts
Special Issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture
Guest edited by Ruijiao Dong, Man He, and Yizhou Huang
This special issue welcomes essays on professionalism and amateurism in modern and contemporary Chinese arts. From the anti-commercialism in the 1920s to the unification of “red and expert” (Mao Zedong, 1958) in socialist China; from the market-oriented professional artists after 1978 to current-day practitioners who work with foreign commissions and the international festival circuit, the evolving meanings of professionalism in Chinese arts has yielded various (un)spoken rules in the making and the reception of arts in China. Correspondingly, the definition of amateurism has also transformed in a shifting political and cultural terrain. Once, it was celebrated as the mode of participatory mass art, and, at other times, it was disparaged as cheesy and unproductive. Understandings of these two concepts, as well as their porous boundaries have been repeatedly ruptured and redefined. How do we trace this shifting ground on which professionalism and amateurism have assumed new meanings and significance? How do the expressions of professionalism and amateurism in the social, political, and cultural discourses channel into Chinese arts, and how do Chinese arts, in turn, continuously shape and reshape these discourses? How do professionalism and amateurism produce and formulate each other in Chinese arts?
We invite scholars from various backgrounds, such as literature and media Studies, art history, sociology, and Chinese studies, to name a few, to formulate an interdisciplinary conversation. To hold together such a vast area of studies, we, as theatre and performance scholars, are keen to bring in performance studies as a theoretical approach and performance as a generative concept in Chinese studies. Since the 1960s, performance studies has significantly reshaped humanistic inquiries by expanding the object of studies, interrogating critical theories, and championing interdisciplinarity. Despite their prevalence, performance and performance studies are often suggested but remain unarticulated in Chinese studies scholarship, especially when the concept of performance is evoked beyond theatre, dance, and performance art. Guobin Yang and Hongwei Bao are among the few scholars outside of theatre, dance, and performance studies who deploy performance as an analytical lens. Yang uses it to examine Red Guard radicalism and social activism during the Wuhan lockdown (The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China, 2016; The Wuhan Lockdown, 2022) whereas Bao explicates how “the articulation between queerness and performance inevitably generates political and critical potentials” (Contemporary Chinese Queer Performance, 2023). Continue reading Professionalism and Amateurism (MCLC)–cfp
