"Revolutionary Melodrama: Tales of Family, Kinship, and the Nation in Modern China"

Shuangting Xiong, PhD candidate, East Asian Languages and Literatures, and 2020-21 OHC Dissertation Fellow "My dissertation examines how melodrama, a quintessentially bourgeois form, was utilized and repurposed across different media by intellectuals and writers to produce new affective experiences, to cultivate new political subjectivities, and to make revolution in modern China. I argue that revolutionary melodrama functions as an emotional pedagogy in which abstract revolutionary ideas and ideals are made emotionally legible, and political solidarities more possible, to people at the micro-level of individuals and families."