Staging the Blackface Nation: The Performance of Blackness in Modern China

Abstract

This dissertation, Staging the Blackface Nation: The Performance of Blackness in Modern China, examines Chinese performances of racial blackness for Chinese and international audiences. By telling the history of Chinese performance of blackness in China’s long twentieth century and in the twenty-first century, this project tells a performance history of modern China: from the Western and Japanese colonialism in China in the late nineteenth century to its transformation from an empire to a modern nation at the beginning of the twentieth century; from the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the global revolutionary age of the sixtieth; and from the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1976 as the opening of China’s post-socialist era to the Covid-19 pandemic time in 2020. By looking at this long period, this project seeks to understand the place of blackness in China’s modern nation-building project, as well as in China’s transnational relationships with the global world: a topic that has not been studied before, but without which, I argue, we cannot properly understand China’s national imaginary.