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Abstract
As the fin-de-siècle New Leftist champions of revolution, Zhang Guangtian, Huang Jisu and Shen Lin struck a melancholic note with their collaborative play Che Guevara (Qie Gewala) (2000-1) on the postrevolutionary, depoliticized Chinese stage. Why do these Chinese theatre-makers still carry on ‘left melancholy' amid the worldwide postrevolutionary arena that has bid ‘farewell to revolution'? Whose memories and histories do these artists attempt to reclaim and retrieve through this melancholy? How do affective and Marxist theories of ‘left melancholy' expand the perceptions of recurrent revolutionary pathos in post-revolutionary Chinese leftist theatre? How does the play's radical recuperation of leftist theatrical techniques, in turn, reinterpret ‘left melancholy' and resist the marketized, depoliticized trends? This article attempts to depart from and expand the current academic focus on ‘left melancholy', which has been largely confined to Western leftist theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Wendy Brown and Enzo Traverso, to the postrevolutionary Chinese context. Integrating Western theories with Chinese interpretations of the concept by New Left scholars such as Wang Hui, along with Judith Butler's theory of subjection (1997), I argue that Che Guevara extends the connotation of left melancholy as a ‘performative paradox’ between an existential, passive despair and a radical, active aesthetic agency of hope to counteract the depoliticized trend of commercial theatre, through an exploration of its affective, theatrical and ideological significance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by the China Scholarship Council under the Trinity College Dublin-China Scholarship Council Joint Scholarship programmes [number 202006900014]. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer and my editor Alvin Eng Hui Lim for their inspiring and enlightening advice and comments on my article. My supervisor Brian Singleton has also given tremendous support to my writing. A short version of the initial draft was presented to the Political Performance Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) 2023 at Accra, Ghana. I would also like to thank the colleagues there who gave me valuable advice.
Notes
1 In terms of translation of names, all Chinese names here retain their standard format by alphabetizing the family name first, followed by the given name, unless the Western format is adopted in a specific name and widely accepted in the scholarship, such as ‘Ban Wang’. In the References, these names will appear without a comma, such as ‘Shen Lin’, instead of ‘Shen, Lin’. In terms of intext quotations, they will appear in the form of full names to avoid confusion. In terms of performance analysis, my references are mostly based on the play’s premiere script in 2000 in Beijing, which is included in Liu Zhifeng’s edited volume, and performance reviews of subsequent revivals during 2000 and 2001 when the play garnered the greatest theatrical and social attention and impact (Liu Citation2001: 13–69). My citation of the premiere script comes from the English translation by Jonathan S. Noble in Xiaomei Chen’s edited volume, The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2014: 927–66). The play was further recorded in 2005 by Jiangsu Province Performing Arts Group (Jiangsusheng yanyi jituan) and revived in Beijing and in the Madang Theatre Festival in South Korea in 2005. However, the revival, directed by its previous actress Yang Ting, is different from the premiere’s performing style, which is not the scope of this article.
2 The term ‘left melancholy’ was coined by Walter Benjamin in 1931 and developed and echoed by other Western leftist scholars such as Wendy Brown, Jodi Dean and Enzo Traverso, which I will illustrate later in the article. As a global cultural and political phenomenon, the idea of ‘farewell to revolution’ was primarily developed by Chinese scholars Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu in their coauthored book Farewell to Revolution: Looking back at the China of the twentieth century (Gaobie geming: huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo) published in 1995.
3 While there are a few investigations on ‘left melancholy’ in Chinese literature and culture (Wang Hui 2000a; Tu Citation2021), Chinese theatre studies have rarely touched upon this notion.
4 In Cuba, Mao’s works and theories on guerrilla warfare were embraced by Cuban guerrillas. Inspired and impressed by Mao’s works, Guevara was also an admirer of Mao and met Mao during his visit to China in 1960.
5 The Chinese New Leftists, emerging in the early 1990s, did not become widely accepted until 1997–8 to ‘indicate positions outside the consensus’, especially against liberalism and capitalism (Wang Hui 2000b: 76). More investigations on this intellectual group can also be found in Wang Hui’s article (71–7). Due to their identification with the poor and the downtrodden represented in the play and their personal experiences, the three major creators, Huang Jisu, Shen Lin and Zhang Guangtian, were categorized as ‘the New Left’ by some critics (Wang Xiaodong 2001: 269). See also Wang Xiaodong (2001).
6 As a symbol of both the twentieth-century revolutions and all revolutions against oppression in human history, Granma is the boat that carried Guevara, Castro and another eighty guerrillas from Mexico to Cuba in November 1956 to embark on the armed struggle against Fulgencio Batista (1901–73), the US-backed military dictator in Cuba.
7 Such a binary opposition between negative female and positive male characters was problematic for gender concerns, though the creators maintain that such a division was dependent on the actors’ own performing styles, instead of a conscious choice. However, gender issue is not the focus of this article, thus I will not delve into this problem here.
8 See Yinghong Cheng (Citation2003: 1–43); Li Ruru (2001: 129–44); Wei Zheyu (2017: 98–104); Xiao Gongqin (2002: 93–112); Zhao Mu (2007: 106–10).
9 The play premiered in the little theatre of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre in April and May 2000 for thirty-seven performances with ‘an average 120% audience attendance’, according to Xu Panwen and subsequently revived in such metropolises as Shanghai and Guangzhou as well as smaller cities such as Chengdu and Kaifeng (Liu Citation2001: 6). Several television stations (including Beijing’s CCTV, the most influential one in China) broadcast performance clips and featured programmes on the play. These all established Che Guevara as one of the few plays that extended beyond theatre itself and stormed China’s intellectual and cultural spheres.
10 In fact, Wendy Brown also yearns to ‘invigorate’ the left melancholic through ‘a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society’ (1999: 26). However, without lived experiences of socialist ideals, she questions, ‘[How] might we draw creative sustenance from socialist ideals of dignity, equality, and freedom, while recognizing that these ideals were conjured from historical conditions and prospects that are not those of the present?’, which is different from the perspective of Chinese New Left (26–7).
11 For a detailed investigation of the transmission of psychology in twentieth-century China, see Larson (Citation2009); Xiao (Citation2017: 11–14).
12 Chen Yingzhen’s left melancholy in his novels has been further unpacked and compared with another Chinese novelist Wang Anyi’s writings by Tu Hang (2021: 122–60).
13 For a detailed investigation of Taiwan’s leftist theatre practices influenced by Chen Yingzhen and the magazine Renjian, see Han Jialing (2018: 1–45).
14 The friendship with Brecht greatly influenced Benjamin’s conceptualization of politics and aesthetics. See Wizisla (Citation2016).
15 Benjamin also preferred the ‘more public and political phase’ of literary expressionism that extends the subject-matter to a ‘political messianism’, according to the translator’s note in Benjamin’s article ‘Left-wing melancholy’ (Benjamin 1974 [1931]: 32).
16 For more information about the origin and development of leftist theatre in China, see Song Jianlin (2007); Zhu Weibing (2006).
17 Eisenstein’s montage approach, by juxtaposing different images of, for instance, factory workers’ protests, policymakers and capitalists, elicits ideological meanings and strong emotional responses from the audiences, which evidently inspires Guevara’s staging.
18 The troupe’s approach of collective creation also resembles Ariane Mnouchkine and her company le Théâtre du Soleil’s creative method. For more details, see Singleton (Citation2020: 39–60).
19 With a summary of the research on the functions and effects of the Living Newspaper in three waves from 1930s to the present, Jordana Cox emphasized the previous ignorance of and recent attention to the spectator in Living Newspaper (2017: 305–6).