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Riding Off into the Sunrise: Genre Contingency and the Origin of the Chinese Western

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Daniel Fried
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Abstract

The paradoxical dependence of genre histories on historically accidental acts of naming and on transcendental critical imagination is demonstrated by the Chinese western, a little-understood genre that has become a major part of Chineselanguage cinema over the past two decades. After the genre was proposed in 1984 by the Chinese film theorist Zhong Dianfei, as a realist reaction against the ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution, its ambiguous status as a Hollywood import quickly became a proxy for larger cultural battles over China's place in an American-dominated international cultural system. Moreover, despite assurances by Zhong and other critics that the genre was not susceptible to Hollywood influence, the production history of the genre from the late 1980s to the present demonstrates a pattern of generic influence and eventual fusion that tracks Chinese state-owned studios' evolution from subsidized propaganda organs to participants in a globalized entertainment industry.

Type
Special Topic: Remapping Genre Coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 5: Special Topic Remapping Genre , October 2007 , pp. 1482 - 1498
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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