Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China
by Ying Qian

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.

With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizations. She reveals the foundational role documentary media played in the Chinese Communist Revolution as a bridge between Marxist theories and Chinese historical conditions. In considering the years after the Communist Party came to power, Qian traces the dialectical relationships between media practice, political relationality, and revolutionary epistemology from production campaigns during the Great Leap Forward to the “class struggles” during the Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of society in the post-Mao decade. Exploring a wide range of previously uninvestigated works and intervening in key debates in documentary studies and film and media history, Revolutionary Becomings provides a groundbreaking assessment of the significance of media to the historical unfolding and actualization of revolutionary movements.

About the Author

Ying Qian is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. As a scholar of cinema and media, Ying Qian is interested in the role of media and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge, and connecting realms of experience. Her first book, Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China (Columbia University Press, 2024), excavates documentary’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It approaches documentary as an “eventful medium” and as a prism to examine the mutual constitution of media and revolution: how revolutionary movements gave rise to specific media practices, and how these media practices in turn, contributed to the specific paths of revolution’s actualization. She teaches classes on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary media, media of science and technology, and comparative media theory and history.

About the Speakers

Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University, and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. Author of two award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991) and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001). A founder of the Visible Evidence conference on documentary, she continues to publish on documentary activism, intellectual property in the internet age, the history of piracy, and most recently has critiqued the “historical turn” in film and media studies as “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?” and “Eisenstein’s Absolutely Wonderful, Totally Impossible Project,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He has also published widely on issues of technology and breakdown, piracy and intellectual property, the global circulation of cultural forms, infrastructure and urban space, sound studies, and Nigerian film (Nollywood).

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities and former Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology. She is the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Harvard UP, 2004); and Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, Translated Modernity (Stanford University Press, 1995).

Gray Tuttle is the Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. He studies modern Tibetan history, from the 1600s to the 1950s. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in the history of twentieth-century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing Empire is central to all his research. In his Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (Columbia UP, 2005), he examined the failure of nationalism and race-based ideology to maintain the Tibetan territory of the former Qing empire as integral to the Chinese nation-state. Instead, he argues, a new sense of pan-Asian Buddhism was critical to Chinese efforts to hold onto Tibetan regions (one quarter of China’s current territory).

Zhen Zhang is a Professor and directs the Asian Film and Media Initiative in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, USA. Her publications include An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (2005); The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007); DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film (co-editor, 2015); Women Filmmakers in Sinophone World Cinema (2023); The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (lead editor, 2024). Zhen Zhang also curates film programs and serves as a jury member for various platforms. Her creative practices include poetry, memoire, performance, experimental and documentary filmmaking.

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