New Book Publication: Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (Harvard University Asia Center, Feb 2025), edited by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang.
Introduction: Chinese Animation: A Statement of the Field (by Daisy Yan Du, John A. Crespi, and Yiman Wang)
The Introduction defines Chinese animation studies as a new field of research emerging from the margins of modern Chinese literature and film studies on the one hand and from the peripheries of American, European, and Japanese animation studies on the other. It begins with a review of scholarly work on Chinese animation from the early 1970s to the present, and then invites readers to imagine the formation of Chinese animation studies as a “plasmatic” process that, like animation itself, promises release from conventional perceptions of the world. Key among these perceptions is the essentializing notion of Chinese animation. Rather than avoiding the term Chinese, which would be impracticable, the volume opts for Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” that, on the one hand, stakes a claim to a strategic unitary identity on par with American, European, and Japanese animations. At the same time, however, the contributors’ essays deconstruct a stable imagination of Chineseness by describing an ever-shifting, alternate archive of film history whose multiplicity, heterogeneity, and playful encounters with spectators entail not a telos of development, but rather “multiple lines of descent.” The Introduction concludes with an overview of the chapters included in the volume’s five sections: Junctures, Gender, Identity, Digitality, and Practices.
