Full Description
Staging Tianxia explores the ancient Chinese vision of world order tianxia (all under heaven) by focusing on the historical, performative, and rhetorical processes of expressive arts and cultural heritages that inform a vision of China as a historically multiethnic and cosmopolitan nation.
Staging Tianxia unites multimedia ethnographic research and theoretical insights from ethnomusicology, philosophy, religious studies, performance studies, and cognitive science, with a focus on Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a modern interpretation inserted into the Chinese classical dance and theatrical arts tradition. It thus aims to redefine Silk Road studies and Dunhuangology, a transdisciplinary field dedicated to studying the texts and art of Dunhuang, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that connected China via the Silk Road with Central Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Staging Tianxia is a careful ethnographic study that looks at the importance of performance tradition and poetics in the arts and aesthetic theory of China.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Translations, Pronunciations, and Style Rules
Cave Charts
1. Introduction
2. Tianxia, Chinascapes, and Dunhuang
3. Imagining Dunhuang: Literary Topography
4. Institutionalizing the Dunhuang bihua yuewu: Past and Present
5. Creating Dunhuang bihua yuewu: Key Concepts and Terms
6. Staging Dunhuang Arts in Context(s): Case Studies
7. Being-in-the-Field: Staged Dunhuang Arts and Intertextual Representations
8. Nation-Building: Dunhuang Meta-Elements in Peking Opera and Beyond
9. Coda: China's New Cosmopolitan Heritages
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
