Inside Chinese Theater
Cloth: 03/25/2025
About the Book
In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese opera theater arrived as one of the significant performing art forms in California. Nancy Yunhwa Rao excavates and contextualizes the important history of Chinese Opera Theater, bringing to light the ways it became woven into the financial, political, social, and family life in California and beyond. Chinese opera theater found brick-and-mortar homes with San Francisco theaters like the Hing Chuen Yuen and the Donn Qui Yuen. But troupes had already followed Chinese immigrants to mining and railroad towns, and across the American West. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal diaries, newspapers and artifacts to place Chinese theater within the everyday life of San Francisco and nonurban places like miner's camps. She also examines the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves.Illustrated with seventy photographs, Inside Chinese Theater is an expert and eloquent journey into the early decades of Chinese opera in America.
* Publication of this book was supported by grants from the H. Earle Johnson Subvention Fund of the Society for American Music, the Judith McCulloh Endowment for American Music, the General Fund of the American Musicological Society, and the Rutgers University Research Council.
Open Access edition supported by a grant from the Fellowships Open Books Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
About the Author
Nancy Yunhwa Rao is a professor of music at Rutgers University and the author of Chinatown Opera Theater in North America.Reviews
"Undergirded by extensive archival research and perceptive analysis, Rao’s book weaves together a myriad of diverse examples that include music-making in Chinese schools and the occasional appearances of Chinese actors in American burlesques and plays, in addition to the more sustained enactments. Each of these events makes clear how important the performing arts were to thecultural life of Chinese communities."--Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
Blurbs
“Capturing the extraordinary movements, sounds, spectacles, and central presence of Chinese Cantonese opera in nineteenth-century California, Nancy Rao’s Inside Chinese Theater presents a fascinating and long neglected cultural history that is simultaneously American and Transpacific.”--Gordon H. Chang, author of Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
“This comprehensive and encyclopedic history of staged performances of transpacific music explores the emergence of a complex visual and aural system of signification that shaped and reflected the lives of nineteenth century Chinese immigrants in California. Nancy Yunhwa Rao’s brilliantly inventive and imaginative book reveals the importance of asking and answering difficult yet immensely generative questions about the nature of archival research, about performance as a site of racial formation, and about the roles of sight and sound in shaping social identities.--George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
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