Contesting British Chinese Culture.
Contesting British Chinese Culture, ed. Ashley Thorpe and Diana Yeh, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. ISBN 978-3-319-71158-4. Courtesy of Palgrave Macmillan.
We are pleased to announce the publication of Contesting British Chinese Culture, edited by Ashley Thorpe and Diana Yeh and published by Palgrave Macmillan.
This is the first text to address British Chinese culture. It explores British Chinese cultural politics in terms of national and international debates on the Chinese diaspora, race, multiculture, identity and belonging, and transnational ‘Chineseness’. Collectively, the essays look at how notions of ‘British Chinese culture’ have been constructed and challenged in the visual arts, theatre and performance, and film, since the mid-1980s. They contest British Chinese invisibility, showing how practice is not only heterogeneous, but is forged through shifting historical and political contexts; continued racialization, the currency of Orientalist stereotypes and the possibility of their subversion; the policies of institutions and their funding strategies; and dynamic relationships with transnationalisms. The book brings a fresh perspective that makes both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of race and cultural production, whilst critically interrogating the very notion of British Chineseness.
Katie Hill from the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art contributed writing a chapter, titled “A History Written by Our Bodies”: Artistic Activism and the Agonistic Chinese Voice of Mad For Real’s Performances at the End of the Twentieth Century. In Chapter 4, Katie Hill develops the volume’s focus on the marginalisation of artists by exploring the artistic activism and the agonistic Chinese “voice” of the artistic duo Mad For Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi). Examining how their interventional performance works operate at the borders of the art establishment, mainstream politics, and the British cultural landscape, Hill explores their works as vital agonistic interventions calling for participation and validation in an exclusionary art world. In assessing the specific positioning of the artists, Hill highlights how their position is both invalidated due to their complex, in-between diasporic status within the context of the rise of China and inadequately attended to by postcolonial cultural discourse in the United Kingdom. By discussing how Mad for Real’s interventions have also responded to key events during the late 1990s to early 2000s - antiglobalisation protests, the Iraq war, the consequences of human trafficking - Hill’s chapter demonstrates how their works radically redefine the boundaries of what could be considered “British Chinese” art and, indeed, explore the possibilities of artistic voice within wider global politics.
