港大中文學院

School of Chinese Scholar Book Talk

The Transnational Impact on Identity Formation in Theatre Across the Chinese-Speaking World

Abstract:

The 1980s was a most important decade for global Chinese theatre.  In large part prompted by changes in regional geopolitics, the search for a local identity peaked among the Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asia.  This period coincided with the rise of the professional careers of four important diasporic director-playwrights—Gao Xingjian 高行健 (b. 1940), Danny Yung Ning Tsun 榮念曾 (b. 1943), Stan Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川 (b. 1954), and Kuo Pao Kun 郭寶崑 (1939–2002)—whose efforts shaped the contemporary Chinese-language theater scenes across the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.  While the geopolitical conditions of the Cold War imposed ethno-nationalist identities across the region, in contrast, these dramatists weaved together native, foreign, and Chinese elements in their theater praxis to give voice to the local.  At the same time, by performing cultural identities alternative to the ones sanctioned by their own states, they also debunked the notion of a unified “Chineseness.”  This talk highlights the key role theater and performance played in suturing identity in the diaspora and circulating people and ideas across geographical space, well before cross-strait relations were yet to thaw. 

About the Speaker:

LIM Wah Guan (BA Hons 1 UNSW, MSt Oxford, MA Princeton, PhD Cornell) is Associate Professor of Transcultural Chinese Theatre at National Chung Hsing University.  His research interests span Chinese-language drama, cinema, and literature.  His first monograph Denationalizing Identities: The Politics of Performance in the Chinese Diaspora (Cornell University Press, 2024) examines the role theatre and performance have played in identity formation in Chinese communities across East and Southeast Asia.  He served previously as Assistant Professor at Bard College in New York and the University of New South Wales, Sydney, where he was Lecturer in Chinese Studies in the School of Humanities and Languages, and Fellow of New College.