The Politics of Play: Comedy in Urban China, 1910-1960

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

From amusement halls to tabloid newspapers to cartoons and illustrated satire magazines, various fields of play became a rich ground for writers and artists to navigate modern life and negotiate identities in twentieth-century China. Cities, especially, saw a proliferation of arenas where comedic play created an affective community in which both authors and audiences could enjoy, question, and escape from their urban experiences. By surveying local cultures of play in Shanghai, Chongqing, and Guangzhou from 1910 through the 1950s, this panel explores how written and visual practices of play, pleasure, and parody speak to larger issues of gender norms, nationalism, popular culture, and the imagination of the modern Chinese city. Nga-li Lam examines representations of and policies about female visitors in amusement halls in early Republican Shanghai to revise understandings of gendered subjectivity in these popular sites of fun and games. Through her study of mixed gender socialization in the popular literature and cartoons of 1920s and 1930s Guangzhou, Roanna Cheung explores the use of humor and gender in the construction of regional identity and Chinese modernity. Chia-ying Shih examines thoughts on Chongqing modernity, the hybrid of Nanjing modernity and Shanghai modernity, through analyzing tabloid satire published in wartime Chongqing. Finally, in his study of the middle-years of the People’s Republic of China’s longest running pictorial satire magazine, Manhua (1950-1960), John Crespi visually maps the re-emergent cityscape as a comically contested ideological ground of the urban everyday and Chinese socialist modernity. Christopher Rea will act as the discussant.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Roanna Yuk-Heng Cheung, University of California, Los Angeles

Chair

• Christopher Rea, University of British Columbia

Individual Presentations

• Women as Pleasure-Seekers in the Amusement Halls of Early Republican Shanghai - Nga Li Lam, Hang Seng Management College

• Open Socialization, Forbidden Desires: Mixed Gender Contact, Humor and the Female Body in Republican Guangzhou - Roanna Yuk-Heng Cheung, University of California, Los Angeles

• Chongqing Modernity: Tabloid Satire in Wartime Chongqing - Chia-ying Shih, Independent Scholar

• The Resurgent City in Chinese Cartoons of the 1950s - John A. Crespi, Colgate University

Discussant

• Christopher Rea, University of British Columbia