Chinese Theatre in the Mao Years

This course focuses on two major issues: policing traditional theater and "model revolutionary drama" as "a new proletarian culture." The course will begin with a study of Mao Zedong's ideas on literature and art in the light of contemporary cultural theory. It will then look at examples of the "new opera" and "new history play," examining them in relation to a complex of censorship issues concerning the exercise of political power in administering human life and the body, literature and drama as political representation, and the hermeneutics of censorship.