Mi Liu

Mi Liu is currently a doctoral candidate at the Arizona State University with a specialization in premodern Chinese literature. She received her BA from Sun Yat-sen University and MA from Chinese University of Hong Kong, respectively majoring in Chinese Language and Literature and Inter-Cultural Studies.

Mi’s main fields are premodern Chinese performance culture and vernacular literature. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on the representation of cultural otherness in early Chinese theater. She approaches this topic by accentuating the concept of performance in early Chinese theater.  She proposes that, in early plays (13-15th centuries), the contentions between cultural other and self are created through carefully wrought dramatic tension. How the playwright’s choice of mise-en-scène (i.e. interpersonal dramatic conflicts rendered via cultural negotiables such as emotion, language, and morality) functions as a deliberate choice building toward dramatic tension that defines the cultural self as opposed to the other. She investigates the negotiation of cultural centrality as opposed to the marginal in dramatic characters’ bid for authority and power in a range of designated cultural roles in domestic and bureaucratic order from the follow perspectives:1) Emotional authenticity in actions/performances; 2) Language use as a vehicle of ethical order; 3) Moral dilemma created by the contradictory performances that are required by different political systems.

Mi is paying close attention to another subject related to her general interest in performance: how the zhuan form of singing functioned as an indispensable yet understudied formative stage of premodern Chinese theater. The zhuan singing introduced such musical sophistication that individual songs came to be strung together in lengthier and aurally enchanting sequences that were to develop into song suites as components of the fully established zaju theater. By tracing such a historical trajectory she is also calling attention to the aggregation of different fields of knowledge in the entertainment culture, such as storyteller’s performance, stylized singing and peddling, ball games, word games such as charade and pun-based riddles.