Homemade faces in a foreign mirror: 'Mimetic authenticity' in Sino-Western cultural interchange of the 1930s.

摘要

This dissertation is divided into four chapters, all focusing on different aspects of a cross-cultural phenomenon I have labeled "mimetic authenticity." I begin my study within the cultural context of my field, Chinese culture, and expand upon much wider applications for my work in the third and fourth chapters. In the 1930s, China was a country that struggled with establishing a presence for itself on an international scale. Due to the Western influence originating mostly from the presence of encroaching colonizers, what would become the Chinese identity within the modernizing push felt among China's political and intellectual leaders was not only in question, but at the center of fierce polemics and public displays. Around this time, it was the norm for students and intellectuals to go to Western countries and learn from Occidental models in the hope that it would bring them an equal sort of modernity. There were, however, a select few that had done just the opposite, bringing Chinese arts to the West in order to demonstrate their Chinese culture, rather than simply absorb the influence of Western trends. My work focuses on the cases of S. I. Hsiung the playwright, Mei Lanfang the Peking Opera performer, and Xu Beihong the master painter.;Because of the trend-breaking move by such artists, media attention placed special significance on their successful Western exhibitions. Through Chinese reporting on exhibitions that placed Chinese art at the forefront of West-related news, the Chinese had the opportunity to rediscover themselves. As the reports focused on the particular aspects of the Chinese arts that the Western audiences enjoyed most, the readers back in China were shown the novelty in their arts that had become familiar or taken for granted, and given cause to appreciate their value as facets of their culture. I label this effect the "reversed Oriental Gaze," and in addition to being a phenomenon that defined these cultural interactions, it was a potential informer to the second phenomenon I discuss in the dissertation, the "double selection process." The idea of the double selection is based on a dually-informed selection process that these artists put their art through before foreign presentation, wherein the art to be presented was modified based on what they thought would be well-received pieces of their artistic discipline and through feedback from Western sources that delineated their own preferences. I demonstrate how their art was amended to suit anticipated preconceptions that Western audiences held of China and its art, and how in doing so these arts earned the admiration of many of their countryman and symbolic victories for China on the international scale.;After establishing the phenomena described above, I describe in theoretical terms what the extended meaning of these cross-cultural successes becomes when such cultural revisions are taken into account. To do this, I employ the idea of "mimetic authenticity" to describe how the arts in question, though arguably inauthentic by native standards, were received authentically by their interlocutors. The discussion surrounding mimetic authenticity addresses the ramifications of the presentations in historical terms and covers the ideological and metaphysical developments that follow such mimetically authentic cultural gestures. I close my study with a discussion of a pluralization of the previous concept that can be applied to greater populations of the "subaltern." Namely, this plurality is what I call "the culture of mimetic authenticity," and by demonstrating the plurality of the mimetically authentic, I establish a new paradigm for understanding cross-cultural encounters.