Performing Hybridity in Colonial-Modern China is a field-defining attempt to reconfigure the way twentieth-century Chinese drama is historicized. It does so by reclaiming the reputation of a dramatic genre called wenmingxi, also known as “civilized drama” (1). Wenmingxi's lack of authoritative scripts, purportedly accurate translations, and Westernized performance practices have been used as justifications for deemphasizing its historical legacy for decades. Practitioners and scholars have instead canonized a twentieth-century theatrical genre called huaju (“spoken drama”; 2), because it is supposedly more aligned with nationalism, modernism, and aesthetic maturity. To Liu, the stakes of such an elision from Chinese- and English-language scholarship have been played out on historical, literary, and performative grounds. He asserts that contemporary understandings of modern drama in China and Japan as “socially conscious, speech-centric, and commercially untainted realistic plays” (2) affirm an underlying belief in linear historiography, describing an evolution from crude wenmingxi to cultivated works of art. This book instead emphasizes wenmingxi and its “melodramatic and performance-based dramaturgy that also includes singing, dance, and female impersonation” (3). Liu offers a powerful counternarrative to the myth that modern drama developed along a straight and cohesive path, guided by nationalism and the ideals of Western dramaturgy.
The theoretical constructs influencing these insights come from a postcolonial framework in which cultural products are readily interpreted as hybridized. However, Liu uses his introduction to lay out the difficulty of fitting wenmingxi into a postcolonial definition of hybridity, as it can be viewed neither as corresponding to Homi Bhabha's “subversive power of resistance” nor as “a celebration of contemporary transcultural artistic fusion” (4). He thus uses the term “colonial modernity” (5) to transition from a standard postcolonial model, with definitive boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized, to an East Asian context, in which colonialism was a form of soft power wielded by a nation's government authorities and the cultural elite. While this is a well-known idea in Chinese studies, Liu's attempt to destabilize a linear view of history is indeed a fresh perspective. He employs Mikhail Bakhtin and Brian Stross to adopt a theory of hybridity cycles, positing that modern drama is “yet another hybridity cycle of the nation's long theatrical history,” and wenmingxi should be positioned “at the beginning or the ‘birth’ of this specific hybridity cycle” (6).
Performing Hybridity is one of the first English-language works to make substantial connections between theatre in Japan and China, and the book's first three chapters are evidence of the advantages to such an approach. Liu presents fastidious archival research on wenmingxi and its parallel Japanese genre shinpa (“new school drama”; 1), which share the reputation of being mere forerunners to later forms of purportedly more mature dramas. This similarity motivates Liu to write a corrective history of the development of a national theatre discourse (Chapter 1), and the association between Japanese shinpa practitioners and Chinese intellectuals studying abroad (Chapter 2). This rich discussion of transnational collaboration is the background for the narrative of the rise and fall of domestic wenmingxi (Chapter 3), making the case that the genre's international history is relevant to both Chinese history and world theatre. Beyond the historical importance of acknowledging the profound influence Japanese theatre movements held over Chinese drama's founders, Liu's expertise allows him to delineate subtly between various modern and traditional genres of performance without necessarily fitting them into a chronology of progress. While doing so, the book pushes up against the boundaries of nationalism, acknowledging drama's critical importance to the conceptualization of the nation in China and Japan and yet rejecting any version of theatre history that would view wenmingxi and shinpa as isolated symbols of one country's performance culture alone.
Liu also makes a groundbreaking intervention into the field of Chinese drama by discussing the labor of adaptors, directors, and performers in tandem with literary analysis. The logocentric bias at the heart of China's modern theatre is epitomized by its name, huaju, a symbolic reminder that dialogue has consistently been positioned as the genre's defining characteristic. Scholars have followed this lead and tirelessly emphasized the literary value of Chinese drama at the expense of its performative features. Performing Hybridity intervenes in this practice by constructing an array of hybridities Liu labels as literary, translative, and performative. In Chapter 4 Liu looks at literary hybridity, wenmingxi's tendency to prioritize loose scenarios for actors' improvisations over scripts, in order to discredit the claim that mature scripts should be a standard for historical relevance. Similarly, the fifth chapter, on translative hybridity, compares two adaptation strategies: acculturation and foreignization. The canonized genres in Japan and China exhibited a penchant for foreignization—preserving exotic/Western settings, names, and cultural habits of source scripts. However shinpa and wenmingxi instead localized their adaptations, revealing a contrasting emphasis on popular support and a belief that “to be commercially successful meant finding ways to remain topical, accessible, and relevant” (134). Performance hybridity is the subject of Chapter 6, which serves as a culminating discussion of the tension between a text and its staging. Liu extends many of the script-centered concerns in the previous two chapters into an analysis of the debates about acting styles in the early twentieth century: conventions governing gestures, the incorporation of music, and the performance of gender. The harmony Liu constructs among performance records, theoretical essays, and literature illuminates a range of theatrical activities, many of which have been understudied or ignored.
Although it is unreasonable to expect a book like Performing Hybridity to parse all of the directions it opens for future study, it would have been helpful to include some comments on the way this sedimentation of dramaturgical values in the early twentieth century should affect the analysis of plays from the 1930s and beyond. Liu convincingly explodes customary divisions of dramatic genres—transnational versus local, pre- versus post-twentieth century, and so on—but does not prescribe a method for applying such revelations outside the book's immediate context. Nevertheless, Performing Hybridity is a significant contribution to the field of Chinese theatre history that will also be compelling to scholars of postcolonial and hybridized world theatre.
