During this academic year, the Division of Russian and Eastern Studies (RAE) in the Dept of Modern and Classical Languages organizes a series of activities under the unified theme of "Discover Asia." Through film showings, faculty research presentations , and a public lecture, we intend not only to discover, explore, and analyze various parts and aspects of Asia, but we also will interrogate how Asia is discovered, by raising questions such as: What/where is Asia? Who—in terms of race, class, and gender—discovered it? In what ways? To what ends? In what historical contexts?
An integral part of our “Discover Asia” activities is a brown bag series of RAE faculty research presentations over the course of the year. The next presenter is Professor Liang Luo of Chinese Studies and she will give an exciting presentation concerning the 2007 Ang Lee film Lust, Caution. Please come.
Time/Date: 12 noon-1 pm, Thursday, November 17 (next week).
Place: 1045 POT
Presentation Title: Performance, Politics, and Popularity in Lust, Caution
Synopses: In Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, the triumphal patriotic narrative so pervasive in Chinese cultural productions throughout the twentieth century, came to a gloomy end. The Chinese student activists who plotted to assassinate a Japanese collaborator during the Second Sino-Japanese War were betrayed by one of their own and were executed together. If the legendary Shanghai writer Eileen Chang, writing the original story in Hong Kong and in the United States, was deconstructing nationalism in the midst of Cold War politics, Ang Lee’s twenty-first century cinematic contemplation was saturated with his unique perspective as a Taiwanese director of Mainland origin, established in Hollywood, who had international capital and talent at his disposal to reflect on this controversial yet defining moment in modern Chinese culture and politics. The world of politics and the world of performance are constantly interpenetrating in Lust, Caution. Performance becomes the means and the end, a sensitive crystallization of the mentality and practice of a generation of young people seeking to unleash their patriotic and sexual desires. Musical form, as expressed in performance and role-play, is related in an intimate way to social form, to the integration of individual bodies into a social body. This presentation examines the fascinating afterlife of two popular songs from the 1930s’ Shanghai in this 2007 film. It proposes to read this twenty-first century visual text as an epilogue to an enduring narrative highlighting the intersection of performance, politics, and popularity throughout twentieth-century China.
