Hokkien Theatre Across The Seas

This book adopts a refreshing approach by examining Hokkien theatre in a region connected by maritime networks, notably southern Fujian, Taiwan, Kinmen and Singapore. It considers how regional theatre is shaped by broader socio-cultural and political contexts and the motivation to stay relevant in an era of modernisation and secularisation. Political domains are often marked out by land boundaries, but the sea concept denotes fluidity, allowing theatrical forms to spread across these ‘land-bounded’ societies and share a common language and culture. "This is an insightful theatrical study on the web of Chinese cultural networks in southern China and Singapore, and by extension, between China and Southeast Asia in the twentieth century and beyond. Using diverse sources in multiple languages and extensive field ethnography, this is a ground-breaking study which is both didactic and inspiring." - Lee Tong Soon, author of Chinese Street Opera in Singapore (University of Illinois, 2009). "Focusing on Hokkien theatre, this book offers new insights into how Chinese performing art responds to geographical, temporal, and social changes. Historical sources in different languages are widely used to give access to the cultural characteristics of Hokkien theatre, offering valuable ethnographic reports on the contemporary practices of Hokkien theatre in Taiwan, Kinmen, and Singapore. The book comments on the changing ritualistic significance of Hokkien theatre, and help us understand how societies remember the past of a performing tradition, and shape its present." - Luo Ai Mei, Co-Editor of A Preliminary Survey of the Cantonese Eight Song Cycles in South China: History and Sources (2016)

This book offers a stimulating introduction to the Hokkien music drama known as liyuanxi ('pear garden theatre'), heir and current expression of one of China's oldest unbroken xiqu ('Chinese opera') traditions. It considers the genre's history prior to the 20th century, its signal successes before and after the Cultural Revolution, and its national prominence today. Beginning with an analysis of the form's aesthetics and techniques, it proceeds to an overview of its rich and distinctive narrative repertoire, including several dramas unique to the genre. Josh Stenberg illustrates liyuanxi's distinctive musical and narrative qualities and presents the performance art's place, not only in Chinese drama and theatre history, but also in the culture of the historic port city of Quanzhou and the broader Hokkien region and diaspora. This study focuses on the work of the only professional theatre troupe in the genre, the Fujian Province Liyuanxi Experimental Theatre (FPLET), and examines the practice of director and leading actor Zeng Jingping, whose performances have focused attention on the genre's expression of women's desires and ambitions, and on her colleague, playwright Wang Renjie. It argues that new scripts engage with the issues of contemporary China while respecting the genre's traditions and conventions, and have led to rewritings of traditional repertoire by younger female authors. Stenberg's book skilfully demonstrates how a traditional theatre can adapt and thrive in a contemporary society, providing an indispensable introduction while whetting the appetite for the genre's exhilarating live performances.

This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies.

This issue of the Berliner Chinahefte/Chinese History and Society deals with cultural exchanges between China and the outside world and with their impact, mostly in terms of questions regarding tradition and modernity. China is understood more as an area composed of certain cultural elements which may include the Chinese (and Taiwanese) diaspora, where a sense of belonging still exists, and which exerts influence on everyday culture and habits.

A detailed account of the cultural history of the Chinese diaspora, with a focus on the performers and audiences who were involved in the making of Chinese performing cultures in Southeast Asia. Focusing on five different kinds of theatre troupes from China and their respective travels in Singapore, Bangkok, Malaya and Hong Kong, Zhang examines their different travelling experiences and divergent cultural practices. She thus sheds light on how transnational mobility was embodied, practised and circumscribed in the course of troupes’ travelling, sojourning and interacting with diasporic communities. These troupes communicated diverse discourses and ideologies influenced by different social political movements in China, and these meanings were further altered by transmission. By unpacking multiple ways of performing Chineseness that was determined by changing time-space constructions, this volume provides valuable insight for scholars of the Chinese Diaspora, Transnational History and Performing Arts in Asia.

"This volume explores the diverse linguistic landscape of Southeast Asia's Chinese communities. Based on archival research and previously unpublished linguistic fieldwork, it unearths a wide variety of language histories, linguistic practices, and trajectories of words. The localized and often marginalized voices we bring to the spotlight are quickly disappearing in the wake of standardization and homogenization, yet they tell a story that is uniquely Southeast Asian in its rich hybridity. Our comparative scope and focus on language, analysed in tandem with history and culture, adds a refreshing dimension to the broader field of Sino-Southeast Asian Studies"--

The Business of Culture examines the rise of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople who risked financial well-being and reputation by investing in multiple cultural enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rich in biographical detail, the interlinked case studies featured in this volume introduce three distinct archetypes: the cultural personality, the tycoon, and the collective enterprise. These portraits reveal how rapidly evolving technologies and growing transregional ties created fertile conditions for business success in the cultural sphere. They also highlight strategies used by cultural entrepreneurs around the world today.

Minority Stages: Sino-Indonesian Performance and Public Display offers intriguing new perspectives on historical and contemporary Sino-Indonesian performance. For the first time in a major study, this community’s diverse performance practices are brought together as a family of genres. Combining fieldwork with evidence from Indonesian, Chinese, and Dutch primary and secondary sources, Josh Stenberg takes a close look at Chinese Indonesian self-representation, covering genres from the Dutch colonial period to the present day. From glove puppets of Chinese origin in East Java and Hakka religious processions in West Kalimantan, to wartime political theatre on Sumatra and contemporary Sino-Sundanese choirs and dance groups in Bandung, this book takes readers on a tour of hybrid and diverse expressions of identity, tracing the stories and strategies of minority self-representation over time. Each performance form is placed in its social and historical context, highlighting how Sino-Indonesian groups and individuals have represented themselves locally and nationally to the archipelago’s majority population as well as to Indonesian state power. In the last twenty years, the long political suppression of manifestations of Chinese culture in Indonesia has lifted, and a wealth of evidence now coming to light shows how Sino-Indonesians have long been an integral part of Indonesian culture, including the performing arts. Valorizing that contribution challenges essentialist readings of ethnicity or minority, complicates the profile of a group that is often considered solely in socioeconomic terms, and enriches the understanding of Indonesian culture, Southeast Asian Chinese identities, and transnational cultural exchanges. Minority Stages helps counter the dangerous either/or thinking that is a mainstay of ethnic essentialism in general and of Chinese and Indonesian nationalisms in particular, by showing the fluidity and adaptability of Sino-Indonesian identity as expressed in performance and public display.