BOOK REVIEWS the Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2015, 9(2): 337−344 BOOK REVIEWS The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China: Tian Han and the Intersection of Performance and Politics. By LUO Liang. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-472-12034-5. 368pp. $80.00 (hardcover). DOI 10.3868/s010-004-015-0015-1 Despite being a key cultural figures of Republican and early Communist China, Tian Han (1896–1968), whose oeuvre engaged progressive political movements alongside the latest literary, theatrical, and cinematic practices, has, until recently, been conspicuous in Western scholarship only by his absence. Perhaps this avoidance is understandable. Tian’s works—which problematize theoretical binaries, cross literary genres, and incorporate an array of media—as well as Tian’s social circles—expanded through his personal networking with lovers, students, and peers across four decades and several continents—render him a daunting figure to all but the most ambitious researchers. In fact, aside from two groundbreaking essays written earlier this century by Xiaomei Chen, 1 no substantial English scholarship has been done on Tian Han until now. Thankfully, this neglect has been definitively addressed. Liang Luo’s book is a masterful study that treats Tian Han, his signature works, and the various networks Tian led and engaged to a thorough critique. As the title suggests, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China is much more than ‘simply’ the first English-language monograph about the playwright, film director, and lyricist, Tian Han. It is an ambitious account of the international avant-garde movement from the post-World War I era to the early 1960s, and the influence of that movement on the development of modern China, delivered from the perspective of Tian Han as he progresses through the avant-garde locales of Taishō Tokyo (1916–22), Republican Shanghai (1922–37), wartime hinterland (1937–45), and Communist Beijing (1949–68). The author’s thesis consists of three components: 1) during this period, “third world intellectuals” such as Tian Han “thought beyond the nation” and saw themselves as activists in a worldwide struggle for human betterment (34), 2) Tian and his Chinese artist/activist peers were not just “socially engaged” but “artistically in dialogue” with an international avant-garde that saw itself as part of this same struggle (9), and 3) the catalytic interaction between these forces contributed to 1 Xiaomei Chen, “Reflections on the Legacy of Tian Han: ‘Proletarian Modernism’ and Its Traditional Roots,” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Spring 2006), no. 1, 155–215; “Tian Han and the Southern Society Phenomenon: Networking the Personal, Communal, and Cultural,” in Kirk Denton and Michel Hockx, eds., Literary Societies of Republican China (Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 241–58. 338 Book Reviews both the further development of the international avant-garde during World War II and its aftermath (11) and to the creation of the People’s Republic (176). The avant-garde that Luo depicts is anything but “art for art’s sake.” Inspired by the scholarship of Jaroslav Průšek and Leo Ou-fan Lee, Luo views the Chinese avant-garde as “literature and art that aspired to political engagement with society throughout the twentieth-century Chinese revolution” (8). Such a definition aligns the avant-garde with the political vanguard. But at the same time, this self-consciously elite status did not prevent Chinese avant-gardists from seeking to make their work popular. The manner in which Tian Han strove to balance the tension between the “vanguard” and the “popular” can be seen by how he pursued the two themes most central to his work: “creating the new woman” (chuangzao xin nüxing) and “going to the people” (dao minjian qu). Chapter One focuses on Tian Han’s first play, Spiritual Light (Lingguang, 1920), and the context in which this work was created. Stating that it is Spiritual Light’s Christian theme which had caused the play to be kept outside of May Fourth and PRC discourse (24), and disagreeing with scholarship that views Tian’s time in Tokyo as apolitical (26), Luo provides an alternative reading of Tian’s Tokyo sojourn: one in which the dramatist is politically engaged and the Christian symbolism of Spiritual Light is in line with socialist, nationalist, feminist, and romantic trends. Tian, an active member of the Tokyo branches of the Young China Association and the Cosmo Club—organizations that brought together idealists and self-proclaimed revolutionaries from across the political spectrum—was understandably moved in May, 1919, when he learned of events taking place at home. In a letter he wrote to a friend, he praised Peking University students as the “avant-garde” (xianfeng) of the “Chinese renaissance,” infusing the term with both a military and cultural flavor (8). As the May Fourth ethos rendered traditional Chinese beliefs suspect, Christianity (particularly of the Saint-Simonian kind) provided an alternative template for progressive icons and ideas (45). Although the “female Faust” in Spiritual Light “flies in the face of the ‘scientific’ and rationalist feminism of the May Fourth mainstream” (33), the play’s blending of Christian, anti-imperialist, and feminist themes well reflects the zeitgeist of the Taishō Tokyo avant-garde. One of the strengths of Luo’s analysis is the manner in which she situates the Chinese avant-garde within the wider mediasphere. The author explains how new media, such as Hollywood films, “helped to foster a progressive tendency in the discourse of gender and class in East Asia” (47). Tian’s love-affair with the silver screen, begun in Tokyo where he watched over one hundred films, continued in Shanghai where he wrote and directed his own cinematic productions. In 1926, at a time when many of his literary peers were leaving the city for the revolutionary South, Tian remained in Shanghai to begin an independent film company, the Southland Institute of Film and Drama. Two projects that he worked on, A Night .

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