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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Tingting Hu is a research fellow at the Center for Translation and Study of World Literature at Renmin University of China, where she also serves as an assistant professor, teaching literature and creative writing. Hu holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of South Carolina, and her research focuses on contemporary literature, arts, and culture in and beyond China. Her dissertation, “Form and Voice: Representing Contemporary Women’s Subaltern Experience in and Beyond China,” explores the multimedia narratives of transnational women authors. Hu has published academic articles, reviews, and poetry in Cha, An Asian Literary Journal, Cowrie: Comparative and World Literature, Rocky Mountain Review, International Comparative Literature, among others.

Kristin Buhrow is a PhD candidate studying cultural anthropology at Emory University. She obtained her MPhil at the University of Oxford and both a BS and BA from Clemson University. She is interested in subjectivity formation, ethnic, and racial identification and how we come to understand ourselves and our positions within our communities through artistic performance, day-to-day interaction, and the kin and community relationships nurtured through these activities. Her dissertation “The Performance of Ethnicity and the Development of a Double Consciousness: Chinese Dance as a Site of Identity Formation in the American South” investigates interactions between audiences and diverse performers and considers dancers’ understandings of what it means for an aesthetic, gesture, object, or person to be “Chinese,” as well as participants’ own proximity to “Chineseness,” formalized through dance. Buhrow has presented work at the Beijing Dance Academy Annual Forum, the Atlanta Studies Symposium, and the American Anthropological Association national conference.

Abstract

Shaped by the power of global capitalism, “the world” has been understood as a spatialized map of economic networks and transportation lines—almost a synonym for “the globe.” Postcolonial theorist Pheng Cheah calls for a reconceptualization of “the world,” where literary works and similar projects influence our vision of the concept across time, arguing that efforts to temporalize “the world” contribute to the project of deimperialization by challenging existing hegemonies of world-making discourses. This article analyzes Chinese contemporary performance art as one context in which Cheah’s temporal turn is already being practiced and leveraged as a force for deimperialization. This article investigates two artistic works that highlight the discursive power of world-making myths and challenge their premises: One Meter of Democracy (一米民主 2010) and One Rib (一根肋骨 2008), both by award-winning Chinese artist He Yunchang (1967–). These two pieces reenact origin myths propagated by Western colonial powers, which normalize Western ideals of democracy and patriarchy. Through time-based performances of lasting changes in corporeality, such as lifelong injury and healing, He brings these tales out of mythological time and into a current, embodied, creative temporality that exhibits the myths’ constructed/artificial nature and highlights the reality that “the world” includes not only the West but also China, and not only states but also individual agents as coexisting and provisional centers of power. In this way, He challenges the Eurocentric narrative of globalized hierarchies and contributes to the formation of a decolonial “world” of dynamic multicentricity as proposed by performance scholar Meiling Cheng. These temporal interventions via world-making origin myths allow alternative perspectives to gain more nuanced recognition within the discourses that construct “the world” and world histories.

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