Attracting the world's attention: The cultural supplement in Shenzhen municipality

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Volumn 14, Issue 1, 2006, Pages

  O'Donnell, Mary Ann ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249154807     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-14-1-67     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Ann Anagnost, "Constructions of Civility in the Age of Flexible Accumulation," in her National Past-times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 75-97
2. Su Weiguang, Sikao Shenzhen Wenhua Fazhan de Zhanlue (Considerations on Strategies for Shenzhen's Cultural Development) (Shenzhen: Haitian, 1999)
3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 48
4. Marshall Sahlins suggests that precisely because "a system of production is the relative form of an absolute necessity . . . we shall have to examine how indigenous peoples struggle to integrate their experience of the world system in something that is logically and ontologically more inclusive: their own system of the world." Marshall Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of 'The World System,'" in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays, ed. Marshall Sahlins (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 417
5. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dream (New York: Palgrave, 2001)
6. Statistics, again, give a sense of the scale and importance of the Houston Rodeo. For the past ten consecutive years, attendance has topped one million; junior ranchers grossed almost $6 million in public auctions; and it has attracted 1,766 foreign guests from fifty-two countries (see www.hlsr.com, the official Web site of the Houston Rodeo, for more statistics, articles, and images)
7. Jing Wang, "Culture as Leisure and Culture as Capital," positions: east asia cultures critique 9 (2001): 71
8. Rey Chow argues that the terms of symbolic incorporation have material effects. "During the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1989, for instance, even as the West was imagining that its intensive gaze would check the Chinese authorities' display of authoritarianism, these authorities were reacting in exactly the opposite manner. They reacted as if they had been provoked into action in a public space where their authority had been challenged and needed to be reestablished." Rey Chow, "We Endure, Therefore We Are: Survival, Governance, and Zhang Yimou's To Live," in Ethics After Idealism: Theory-Culture-Ethnicity-Reading, ed. Rey Chow (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): 124-25
9. Xiaomei Chen, Acting the Right Part: Political Theatre and Popular Drama in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002)
10. Turner argues that ritual, trials, and theater allow societies to represent particular social dramas to themselves, thereby confirming and reinstituting the core values by which they know themselves. A social drama occurs in response to a breach in what is understood to be the normal working of society. Social dramas escalate into specific social forms - rituals and trials. In contrast, modern theater allows members of society not only to call attention to the violence of everyday life but also to experiment with alternative resolutions to these otherwise suppressed breaches. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982)
11. Discussing how puppies learn, Bateson emphasizes the contextual distinction between bites and nips. The question is always, when do nippers cross the line and get called for biting? See Gregory Bateson, "A Theory of Play and Fantasy," in his Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 177-93
12. This use of the media stages to constitute the political reminds one of Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff's discussion of the "magicality of the state in an age of millennial capitalism." As they note, ruling regimes "become caught up in cycles of ritual excess in which ceremonial enactments of hyphen-nation, alike in electronic space and real time, stand as alibis for realpolitik - which recedes ever farther as its surfaces are visible primarily through the glassy essence of television, the tidal swirl of radio waves, the fine print of the press. . . . State ritual itself, then, becomes something of a pyramid scheme: The more it is indulged, the more it is required." Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 38
13. Anagnost suggests that when the party trained peasants to speak bitterness, they displaced the value of the written word with the spoken. In the terms of the argument I am making, learning "to write upon the 'Real'" entailed a theatrical pedagogy, tying representation to ritual rather than textual practice. Compare with Anagnost, "Making History Speak," in Anagnost, National Past-times, 17-44
14. Jo Riley makes a relevant point with respect to the innovations that Mei Lanfang introduced into Peking Opera, where the audience knew the script and evaluated the performer based on novel interpretations within this format. Performers' qualifications have thus been evaluated with respect to a norm that has been inculcated through shared forms of education. In this sense, the performer is simply the most knowledgeable and therefore most representative of a group rather than explicitly distinct from the audience. See Jo Riley, Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
15. Wenwei Du, "Xiaopin: Chinese Theatrical Skits as both Creatures and Critics of Commercialism," China Quarterly 154 (1998): 382
16. Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 99