A book event organized by China Research Center and GT CIBER November 14, 2014

1. A book event organized by China Research Center and GT CIBER November 14, 2014 New Research on Chinese Cinema and Media

2. Jin Liu, Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium, Brill, 2013. for today’s talk: • Some background • Table of contents • Case studies • Contributions

3. Some background • Local Languages/dialects or fangyan (lit. “regional speech”) • Standard Putonghua Mandarin • the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Chinese Characters (2001) • an expanding use of local languages in mass media • Examines cultural productions through the lens of (local) language

4. Table of Contents Introduction 1. A Historical Review of the Discourse of the Local in Twentieth-Century China 2. An Overview of Television Series Productions in the 2000s 3. Alternative Translation: Performativity in Dubbing Films in Local Languages 4. Empowering Local Community: TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages 5. Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s Spring Festival Eve Gala

5. Table of Content 6. Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet 7. The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others 8. Multiplicity in the Mainstream Commercial Films in Local Languages 9. The Unassimilated Voice in Recent Fiction in Local Languages Conclusion

6. Features • —Covering musicians, directors, and writers such as Cui Jian, Ziyue, Hu Mage, Xue Cun, Jia Zhangke, Lu Chuan, Jiang Wen, Guan Hu, Feng Xiaogang, Joan Chen, Lü Yue, Dai Sijie, Zhang Wei, Yan Lianke, Mo Yan, and Jia Pingwa • — Including case studies such as the sitcoms I Love My Family and Native Husbands and Foreign Wives, dubbed versions of Tom and Jerry, Hangzhou TV’s Aliutou Talks News, Zhao Benshan’s comic sketches, Shanghai Rap, Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy, and Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone

7. Beijing TV’s I Love My Family (1994), the first sitcom in China Guangzhou TV’s Native Husbands and Foreign Wives (2000-), the longest-running sitcom in China

8. Alternative Translation in Dubbed Versions of Tom and Jerry • 17 dialect versions by 2005 • 老皮/碎子儿 (Shaanxi Mandarin version) • 二尕子/小不点 (Northeast Mandarin version) • 猫大头/鼠丫丫 (Beijing Mandarin version) • 老孬蛋/小精豆 (Henan Mandarin version) • 憨头猫/小精怪鼠 (Hubei Mandarin version) • 老油条/小精怪 (Shanghai Wu version) • 假老练/风车车 (Sichuan Mandarin version)

9. Empowering local community in Hangzhou TV's hit show Aliutou Talks News (2004-)

10. Ambivalent laughter in Zhao Benshan’s CCTV comic sketches

11. Shanghai Rap

14. Main thesis This research provides an account of the ways in which local-language media have become a platform for the articulation of multivocal, complex, and marginal identities in post-socialist China. Viewed from the uniquely revealing perspective of local languages, the mediascape of China is no longer reducible to a unified, homogeneous, and coherent national culture, and thus renders any monolithic account of the Chinese language, Chineseness, and China impossible.

15. The Study of Globalization • From the perspective of the local, the nation-state seems more and more identified with globalization and its concomitant homogenization and centralization • ‘glocalization’: a dialectical relationship between the global and the local, which do not pose as cultural polarities but are interpenetrating, interacting, and mutually signifying • Problematize the ‘pseudo-localization,’ or what Stuart Hall calls more “tricky version of ‘the local’ which operates within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by ‘the global’ and operates largely within its logic.”

16. Comedy Study • examines a range of comic genres and forms including comic sketches, sitcoms, and comedy films • Bakhtin’s theory of folk humor • grotesque realism and the ambiguous laughter in the comic sketches of the state media CCTV’s Spring Festival Eve Gala • The logic of ‘insider out’ in Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone • Voloshinov’s theory on ‘reported speech’ and the socio-cultural nature of intonation

17. Comedy study • how the laughter wrought through the presence of local languages can help foster a sense of local community: • Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the ‘bonding activity’ of joke-telling in his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious • Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik’s argument of the ‘communalizing activity’ of the sitcom in their book Popular Film and Television Comedy

18. Audience study • the stratification of audience (local, national, and international) • audience is far from a single homogeneous entity. It varies in terms of age, gender, social origin, social class, and cultural status as well as regional identity. • the selective makers of meaning and resistant audiences • Jia Zhangke’s hometown trilogy • The tension between particularity and universality; between the mimesis and diegesis.

19. Audience study • regional imbalance of audience reception of recent Chinese comedy films: While there is a strong trend for Chinese films, particularly in the genres of martial arts and action films, to strive for a global or transnational film market, the recent low-budget comedy films may signal another direction in the development of Chinese cinema, that is, localization, exploring the regional market and targeting a subnational local audience.