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Topic

Negotiating a Truth of the Underprivileged through Affect in the Sinophone: Hooligan Sparrow and One Child Nation

Department of Pacific and Asian Studies

Date & location

• Tuesday, August 13, 2024
• 9:00 A.M.
• Virtual Defence

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Angie Chau, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, ·¬ÇÑÉçÇø (Supervisor)
• Dr. Andrew Marton, Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, UVic (Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Feng Xu, Department of Political Science, UVic

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Elisabeth Gugl, Department of Economics, UVic

Abstract

The public discourse surrounding Chinese-American filmmaker Nanfu Wang’s two social issue documentaries, Hooligan Sparrow (2016) and One Child Nation (2019), which focus on the social and political dynamics of contemporary China but are only publicly circulated in the West, revolves around “truth,” either praising the films for revealing the untold truth about China or criticizing them for failing to do so. Meanwhile, the aesthetics of both films have been interpreted by scholars and film critics as first-person or subjective. In this dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, the first-person interpretation fails to explain the dominant public truth discourse in its immediate social and political context. In order to understand the truth discourse and reconsider the film aesthetics in their historical specificity, this study approaches these films from Shumei Shih’s concept of the Sinophone, which explains the mechanisms of meaning production of cultural products on the margins of a prescribed and hegemonic concept of “China,” and reveals the power relations in which these films are produced and interpreted. Moreover, by applying a power-knowledge-affect framework, this research proposes to understand the concept of affect as a power or knowledge that reflects, shapes, and negotiates with social constructions of meaning. This thesis argues that the affective aesthetics of Hooligan Sparrow and One Child Nation, as power or knowledge itself, negotiate a truth about the underprivileged in China – those who have fewer advantages, privileges and opportunities, either economically, socially, politically, or ideologically than most people – with the discursive power relations that play out in the Sinophone. Specifically, this negotiation takes place through affective mechanisms and techniques, including the appropriation of the thriller genre and the use of free indirect discourse in both image and sound. By introducing the Sinophone concept into China-related social issue documentaries made on the margins of China, this project also exposes the limitations of current discourses in Chinese studies, such as the exclusion of non-Han cultural products, the tendency to fetishize China and ignore China’s racialized minorities, and specifically bridges the fields of independent Chinese documentary studies and Sinophone studies.