With the rise of Chinese economy and global capitalism, popular culture has proliferated in mainland China in recent years. This course introduces students to Chinese popular media cultures from the 1990s to the present. It historicizes contemporary media cultures by referring back to popular media cultures in the early 20th century and in premodern China. The course covers various forms of Chinese popular media, such as film, music, animation, television serials, emergent digital media, youth-subcultures, and etc. Other popular media objects and phenomena to be explored and discussed include TikTok/Douyin short videos, bullet-titling (danmu) interfaces, Nintendo games, mobile-phone selfies, VR headsets, and etc. Major films to be screened include Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi, 1934), Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007), Dragonfly Eyes (Xu Bing, 2017), A Bright Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991), and Comrades, Almost a Love Story/Tian Mi Mi (Peter Ho-Sun Chan, 1996). Exposed to a large variety of popular media phenomena, students will acquire a multi-perspective and multimedia view of contemporary China in the age of globalization and East Asian regionalization. No prerequisites.
REQUIRED SCREENINGS: MONDAYS @ 7PM
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; FA HUM; AR HUM
