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Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. By XIAOMEI CHEN, Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 466 pp. $ 29.95 (paper).
Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China is a ground-breaking effort to provide a cultural history of modern Chinese drama in Maoist and early post-Maoist PRC that covers the socialist stage from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. With an intention to "rescue dramatic studies from the marginal position they have occupied in Chinese literature and remedy the slight they have suffered because of their so-called overt political implications" (p. 190), Xiaomei Chen continues the trajectory of scholarship that grounds the study of contemporary Chinese revolutionary literature in historical context and inquires into the cultural and ideological dynamics of the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Her book historicizes the multilayered discourse of Cultural Revolution "model theater" (yang ban xi), which perpetuated the intense politicization of everyday life, social behavior, and cultural practices of the Cultural Revolution period and which has since taken deep root in contemporary China in the form of powerful cultural memory.
By situating her studies in larger cross-cultural and cross-historical contexts and incorporating theoretical perspectives and recent scholarship from China and abroad with similar intentions, Chen argues against understanding the emergence and popularity of model theater as a purely ideological invention of the PRC. Her studies of model theater and early...