On September 29, 2024, the USC U.S.-China Institute hosted a workshop at the Huntington’s Chinese garden, offering K-12 educators hands-on insights into using the garden as a teaching tool. With expert presentations, a guided tour, and new resources, the event explored how Chinese gardens' rich history and cultural significance can be integrated into classrooms. Interested in learning more? Click below for details on the workshop and upcoming programs for educators.
Embedded Feminist Agency: Wang Ping and Early Chinese Socialist Cinema
Lingzhen Wang will examine the first Chinese socialist female film director and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (1956), re-theorizing female cinematic authorship
Where
Lingzhen Wang, Brown University
Lingzhen Wang will examine the first Chinese socialist female film director and her most representative film: The Story of Liubao Village (1956), re-theorizing female cinematic authorship as a contingent articulation embedded within dynamic interactions among a multiplicity of historical forces. Her analysis will address three critical issues in Chinese studies: the dismissal of socialist cinema as mere propaganda; the Cold War influence on the study of socialist China and women since the 1980s in American academia; and a reductive post-socialist adoption of poststructuralist theory in the research on Chinese women’s film. Professor Wang will re-historicize/construct the practice of early Chinese socialist cinema (1949-1957) as experimental and situate Wang Ping within that dynamic filmmaking context to reconfigure women’s cultural agency as an historical effect of multi-force significations.
Lingzhen Wang is associate professor at Brown University. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, gender studies, film studies, and transnational feminist theory. In addition to articles in both English and Chinese, she has published a monograph, Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth Century China (2004), edited and co-translated an anthology of Wang Anyi’s work Years of Sadness (2009), and edited a critical anthology, Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts (2011). She is the co-founder and co-editor of the Chinese journal, Gender, Theory, and Culture (2009- ) and the guest editor of a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (forthcoming 2013). She is the Brown director of the Nanjing-Brown Joint Program in Gender Studies and the Humanities.
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