Signifying the local : : media productions rendered in local languages in mainland China in the new millennium / / by Jin Liu.

• Superior document: China studies, volume 25
• Author: Liu, Jin, 1974 August-
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden ;, Boston : : Brill,, 2013.
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: China studies (Leiden, Netherlands) ; v. 25.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (325 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

In Signifying the Local , Jin Liu examines contemporary cultural productions rendered in local languages and dialects ( fangyan ) in the fields of television, cinema, music, and literature in Mainland China. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction -- A historical review of the discourse of the local in twentieth-century China -- An overview of television series productions in the 2000s -- Alternative translation: performativity in dubbing films in local languages -- Empowering local community: TV news talk shows in local languages -- Ambivalent laughter: comic sketches in CCTV's spring festival eve gala -- Popular music and local youth identity in the age of the Internet -- The rhetoric of local languages as the marginal: Chinese underground and independent films by Jia Zhangke and others -- Multiplicity in mainstream studio films in local languages -- The unassimilated voice in recent fiction in local languages -- Conclusion.