The Global White Snake
by Liang Luo
University of Michigan Press, 2021
Cloth: 978-0-472-13261-4 | Paper: 978-0-472-03860-2 | eISBN: 978-0-472-12915-7 (standard)
Library of Congress Classification GR335
Dewey Decimal Classification 398.4690951
Cloth: 978-0-472-13261-4 | Paper: 978-0-472-03860-2 | eISBN: 978-0-472-12915-7 (standard)
Library of Congress Classification GR335
Dewey Decimal Classification 398.4690951
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
The Global White Snake examines the Chinese White Snake legends and their extensive, multidirectional travels within Asia and across the globe. Such travels across linguistic and cultural boundaries have generated distinctive traditions as the White Snake has been reinvented in the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English-speaking worlds, among others. Moreover, the inter-Asian voyages and global circulations of the White Snake legends have enabled them to become repositories of diverse and complex meanings for a great number of people, serving as reservoirs for polyphonic expressions ranging from the attempts to consolidate authoritarian power to the celebrations of minority rights and activism.
The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations.
The Global White Snake uncovers how the White Snake legend often acts as an unsettling narrative of radical tolerance for hybrid sexualities, loving across traditional boundaries, subverting authority, and valuing the strange and the uncanny. A timely mediation and reflection on our contemporary moment of continued struggle for minority rights and social justice, The Global White Snake revives the radical anti-authoritarian spirit slithering under the tales of monsters and demons, love and lust, and reminds us of the power of the fantastic and the fabulous in inspiring and empowering personal and social transformations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Liang Luo is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky.
REVIEWS
— Peter J. Kalliney
— Peter J. Kalliney
“In Liang Luo, the beloved White Snake has found her bard for her numerous retellings and variants across the centuries from folk legend to the Shanghai screen, television, internet animation, feminist novel, and riotous musicals and opera; from forbidden love, struggle against Buddhist norms, and spiritual awakening to women's rights and homosexual love; and from Eastern China's cultural cities (Zhenjiang, Hangzhou, and Suzhou) to transformations in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and the U.S. Lucidly and engagingly written, Liang Luo has not only made accessible a wealth of cultural riches to the Anglophone world, but charted their deployments across Republican, Cold War, and global cultural politics.”
—Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century
— Michael M.J. Fischer—Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century
“In the Chinese legend of the White Snake, woman is not seduced by the snake but is herself the snake. Originating as a very local legend on the deadly dangers of seduction and infatuation, the story grew into one of China’s most popular love stories that allowed its adapters past and present to explore all possibilities of the relations between the sexes. The story also spread widely throughout East Asia and beyond. In this richly illustrated monograph Liang Luo studies the continuous developments of the legend in print, on stage, in cinema, and in digital media in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan as well as Southeast Asia and Northern America from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s, offering an engrossing and highly original window onto the imagination of the Other in East and West.”
—Wilt L. Idema, author of The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of the Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak with Related Texts
— Wilt L. Idema—Wilt L. Idema, author of The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of the Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak with Related Texts
"Despite the considerable breadth of material covered in this book, quantity does not come at the expense of quality, and Luo’s analyses of individual works are careful and engaging. Her close readings avoid unnecessary repetition and guide the reader to the unique qualities of each work, sometimes shifting focus to medium, production history, or cultural/historical context. . . Although the book shines as a whole, each chapter functions as a case study for examining a different cultural context within the global travels of White Snake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
—Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
— Aaron Balivet, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews—Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
"...this book is critical to our understanding of transnational circulations and transcultural mutations of the White Snake legends. This book offers abundant sources and multi-faceted possibilities that welcome future discussions, such as the economic factors that have triggered many White Snake productions. Moreover, it is an innovative reinterpretation to recontextualize folklore and myth with the perspective of global history."
—Asian Theatre Journal
— Asian Theatre Journal—Asian Theatre Journal
"The Global White Snake is a hybrid study that brings together folklore, transnational literature, LGBTQ+ studies, animal studies, media studies, and cultural studies... Written with passion, clarity, and sophis- tication, Luo’s book is an essential text for scholars and students in Chinese studies, East Asian studies, and comparative literature. The book can also form a meaningful dialogue with the recent scholarship on postcolonial animalities."
—The Journal of Asian Studies
— The Journal of Asian Studies—The Journal of Asian Studies
"The book is lucidly and engagingly written. By its end, the reader is presented with lingering questions of what may happen to meanings of cultural objects when they move around the world, and whether we should redefine “humanity” when new windows on the imagination of the “Other” open up one after another in the present era."
—American Review of China Studies
— American Review of China Studies—American Review of China Studies
“The Global White Snake is an astonishing achievement, filled with dynamic examinations of the ancient legend and its many recent global adaptations. Blending insights from media theory, transnational literature, queer studies, folklore, and animal studies, this learned and accessible book shows how cultural objects move around the world and, just as important, how the world makes new meaning out of borrowed cultural objects. The capaciousness and fluidity of the white snake legend itself are matched only by the brilliance and generosity of the account Liang Luo offers in this book.”
—Peter J. Kalliney, author of Modernism in a Global Context
“This rigorous and exciting study presents a folk narrative and its transmutations that will provoke new theoretical directions for examining the relations between traditional and tradition-inspired narrative. The Global White Snake brings together the relevant sources, versions, and theory that will show readers a clear idea of the White Snake narrative tradition and its meanings in various literary, performative, and social contexts. The compelling, stimulating, fascinating scholarship will deepen and expand readers’ understanding of the Chinese vernacular literary/live-performance traditions, as well as the emerging means of transmission and creativity in virtual, online, digital formats.”
—Mark Bender, author of The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China
— Mark Bender—Mark Bender, author of The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China
"This splendid book is the most thorough and enthusiastic study of the White Snake legend in its diverse forms across a global media landscape: from Chinese operas, Japanese anime, Asian films, to stage adaptations in the U.S. The more widely the legend about this seductive deity travels and is transformed in different cultural transformations, the more subversive and transgressive its message becomes. Reading this well researched account is as spellbinding.”
—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
— Leo Ou-fan Lee—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
"...Her generous reading style and open attitude toward source selection provide readers with a wonderful example of how we might approach texts with earnest curiosity for what they might teach us, rather than trying to prove our own intelligence by illuminating all the ways the texts fail. This reader hopes more works in the field will continue to employ a similar cross-regional perspective and hopes even more that they might do so with similar grace, intellect, and care as Luo."
—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
— Noah Arthur Weber, Cha Journal—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
“In Liang Luo, the beloved White Snake has found her bard for her numerous retellings and variants across the centuries from folk legend to the Shanghai screen, television, internet animation, feminist novel, and riotous musicals and opera; from forbidden love, struggle against Buddhist norms, and spiritual awakening to women's rights and homosexual love; and from Eastern China's cultural cities (Zhenjiang, Hangzhou, and Suzhou) to transformations in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and the U.S. Lucidly and engagingly written, Liang Luo has not only made accessible a wealth of cultural riches to the Anglophone world, but charted their deployments across Republican, Cold War, and global cultural politics.”
—Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century
— Michael M.J. Fischer—Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Anthropology in the Meantime: Experimental Ethnography, Theory, and Method for the Twenty-First Century
“In the Chinese legend of the White Snake, woman is not seduced by the snake but is herself the snake. Originating as a very local legend on the deadly dangers of seduction and infatuation, the story grew into one of China’s most popular love stories that allowed its adapters past and present to explore all possibilities of the relations between the sexes. The story also spread widely throughout East Asia and beyond. In this richly illustrated monograph Liang Luo studies the continuous developments of the legend in print, on stage, in cinema, and in digital media in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan as well as Southeast Asia and Northern America from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s, offering an engrossing and highly original window onto the imagination of the Other in East and West.”
—Wilt L. Idema, author of The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of the Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak with Related Texts
— Wilt L. Idema—Wilt L. Idema, author of The White Snake and Her Son: A Translation of the Precious Scroll of Thunder Peak with Related Texts
"Despite the considerable breadth of material covered in this book, quantity does not come at the expense of quality, and Luo’s analyses of individual works are careful and engaging. Her close readings avoid unnecessary repetition and guide the reader to the unique qualities of each work, sometimes shifting focus to medium, production history, or cultural/historical context. . . Although the book shines as a whole, each chapter functions as a case study for examining a different cultural context within the global travels of White Snake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
—Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
— Aaron Balivet, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews—Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
"...this book is critical to our understanding of transnational circulations and transcultural mutations of the White Snake legends. This book offers abundant sources and multi-faceted possibilities that welcome future discussions, such as the economic factors that have triggered many White Snake productions. Moreover, it is an innovative reinterpretation to recontextualize folklore and myth with the perspective of global history."
—Asian Theatre Journal
— Asian Theatre Journal—Asian Theatre Journal
"The Global White Snake is a hybrid study that brings together folklore, transnational literature, LGBTQ+ studies, animal studies, media studies, and cultural studies... Written with passion, clarity, and sophis- tication, Luo’s book is an essential text for scholars and students in Chinese studies, East Asian studies, and comparative literature. The book can also form a meaningful dialogue with the recent scholarship on postcolonial animalities."
—The Journal of Asian Studies
— The Journal of Asian Studies—The Journal of Asian Studies
"The book is lucidly and engagingly written. By its end, the reader is presented with lingering questions of what may happen to meanings of cultural objects when they move around the world, and whether we should redefine “humanity” when new windows on the imagination of the “Other” open up one after another in the present era."
—American Review of China Studies
— American Review of China Studies—American Review of China Studies
“The Global White Snake is an astonishing achievement, filled with dynamic examinations of the ancient legend and its many recent global adaptations. Blending insights from media theory, transnational literature, queer studies, folklore, and animal studies, this learned and accessible book shows how cultural objects move around the world and, just as important, how the world makes new meaning out of borrowed cultural objects. The capaciousness and fluidity of the white snake legend itself are matched only by the brilliance and generosity of the account Liang Luo offers in this book.”
—Peter J. Kalliney, author of Modernism in a Global Context
“This rigorous and exciting study presents a folk narrative and its transmutations that will provoke new theoretical directions for examining the relations between traditional and tradition-inspired narrative. The Global White Snake brings together the relevant sources, versions, and theory that will show readers a clear idea of the White Snake narrative tradition and its meanings in various literary, performative, and social contexts. The compelling, stimulating, fascinating scholarship will deepen and expand readers’ understanding of the Chinese vernacular literary/live-performance traditions, as well as the emerging means of transmission and creativity in virtual, online, digital formats.”
—Mark Bender, author of The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China
— Mark Bender—Mark Bender, author of The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China
"This splendid book is the most thorough and enthusiastic study of the White Snake legend in its diverse forms across a global media landscape: from Chinese operas, Japanese anime, Asian films, to stage adaptations in the U.S. The more widely the legend about this seductive deity travels and is transformed in different cultural transformations, the more subversive and transgressive its message becomes. Reading this well researched account is as spellbinding.”
—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
— Leo Ou-fan Lee—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945
"...Her generous reading style and open attitude toward source selection provide readers with a wonderful example of how we might approach texts with earnest curiosity for what they might teach us, rather than trying to prove our own intelligence by illuminating all the ways the texts fail. This reader hopes more works in the field will continue to employ a similar cross-regional perspective and hopes even more that they might do so with similar grace, intellect, and care as Luo."
—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
— Noah Arthur Weber, Cha Journal—Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Chapter 1. Introduction to White Snake Legends
Gender and Species, Media and Politics
Metamorphoses and Regenerations
Legends of the White Snake
The Power of Transmigration
Aspirations in the Remaking of the Legends
Theoretical Implications
Part I. White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 2. The White Snake Problem versus The White Snake Industry
The White Snake Problem
Inspirations from Kentucky
Mystery of the White Snake
Hangchow, the “City of Heaven”
The White Snake Industry
New White Snake Performances, 1870s to 1920s
The Popularity of jingju, tanci, and yueju
Stage Performance, Urban Gossip, Print Culture, and Intellectual Lamentations
Sounding the White Snake: Shaping New Media, New Practice, and New
Sensibilities
Rong Stage Dominates White Snake Performances
Concluding Remarks: The Fall of the Pagoda and the Burning of the Monastery
Chapter 3. Fall of the Pagoda and Rise of the White Snake: Visualization and Canonization
Fall of the Pagoda and the Visualization of a Vanished Past
Bricks, Scriptures, and Visuality: Relics from and Memories of the Thunder Peak
Legend, Art Photography, and War Drawing: Timely Journalism and Chinese Popular Imagination
Shadows of the Pagoda: Coming to Terms with the Fall through Visual and Textual Representations
The Rise of the White Snake and Canonization of “The White Snake Modern”
Lu Xun’s Verdict and The Righteous Snake on the Silver Screen
The Pagoda in the Film
Concluding Remarks: The White Snake Modern
Part II Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War
Chapter 4. The White Snake Legend in Postwar Japanese Cinema
Exquisite Paradise and Forbidden Love in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
Between Light and Shadow: Infinite Shades of Gray
Sound and Look of a Lady Wakasa Film: Pottery, Water, and Mutual Enchantment
White Pearl, Red Scarf, and “The Witchcraft of Love” in Byaku fujin no yōren
Red Scarf, Manifested Desire, and Significance of Color
Special Effects and Technologies of the “Witchcraft of Love”
From Hong Kong to Southeast Asia
Flowers, Animals, and Humans: Animating the White Snake Legend in Hakujaden
From Live-action to Animation
“Disney of the East” and Connections between China and Japan
Concluding Remarks: A Token of Love
Chapter 5. Reconfiguring the White Snake in Korean Cinema in an Inter-Asian Context
Sino-Korean Cinematic Connections
Shin Sang-ok and the 1960 Madam White Snake
The Shadow of Ugetsu and Holding Hands at First Sight
Dance to Seduce and Lovers’ Chat in a Moonlit Garden
Mutual Love and Devotion, and the Humanity of the Nonhuman
Humanity Aided by Special Effects
Shin’s Forgotten Second Attempt at a “White Snake” Film: Snake Woman in 1969
A Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan Coproduction? Love of the White Snake in 1978
The Taiwan Connection in the Context of a Hong Kong-Singapore Cinematic Matrix
Concluding Remarks: The Korean Connection in an Inter-Asian Context
Part III. The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture
Chapter 6. Dancing White Snake, Writing Green Snake: Reconfiguring the Legend in Mainland China and Hong Kong
Writing and Dancing, the Text and the Body
The Expressiveness of the Hybrid Body and the Iconoclasm of the Green Snake
Writing Women of China
A Dancing White Snake: Centered on the “Untold Stories”
Writing, Dancing, and the Cultural Revolution as Memory and Imagination
Concluding Remarks: Lingering Echoes
Chapter 7. The White Snake Legend in the United States in the Twenty-First Century:
Opera, Drama, and Digital Video
From Chinese Legend to Pulitzer-Prize Winning Western Opera: Madame White Snake
Green Snake the Storyteller
Righteousness against Love, Truth against Freedom
The Singaporean and Mainland Chinese Origins
The Powers and Possibilities of Mary Zimmerman’s The White Snake
The Wuzhen Experience
More Inspirations from Kentucky Students
A Female Writer of Socialist China: Zhao Qingge and Her 1956 Novel
The CTC Production in Washington D. C.
Poetry, Photography, and Fashion: Digital Challenges from Indrani
Chapter 8. Nothing Ever Dies: The Eternal Bodies of the White Snake
Korean Webtoon Lady White and Her Afterlife in Chinese
The Return of the Powerful Hybrid in the 2019 Internet Drama Legend of White Snake
Queering an Icon, Becoming a Demon in the 2019 Animation White Snake: The Legend Begins
Everlasting Bodily Memory: From the 1992 New Legend of Madame White Snake to the 2016 Star of Tomorrow
The Bodies of the Green Snake and the White Snake
Concluding Remarks: The Multiplicity and Openness of the Eternal Bodies of the Snake Women
Notes
Selected Chronological List of White Snake Texts
Selected Bibliography
Glossary
Index
List of Figures
Chapter 1. Introduction to White Snake Legends
Gender and Species, Media and Politics
Metamorphoses and Regenerations
Legends of the White Snake
The Power of Transmigration
Aspirations in the Remaking of the Legends
Theoretical Implications
Part I. White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 2. The White Snake Problem versus The White Snake Industry
The White Snake Problem
Inspirations from Kentucky
Mystery of the White Snake
Hangchow, the “City of Heaven”
The White Snake Industry
New White Snake Performances, 1870s to 1920s
The Popularity of jingju, tanci, and yueju
Stage Performance, Urban Gossip, Print Culture, and Intellectual Lamentations
Sounding the White Snake: Shaping New Media, New Practice, and New
Sensibilities
Rong Stage Dominates White Snake Performances
Concluding Remarks: The Fall of the Pagoda and the Burning of the Monastery
Chapter 3. Fall of the Pagoda and Rise of the White Snake: Visualization and Canonization
Fall of the Pagoda and the Visualization of a Vanished Past
Bricks, Scriptures, and Visuality: Relics from and Memories of the Thunder Peak
Legend, Art Photography, and War Drawing: Timely Journalism and Chinese Popular Imagination
Shadows of the Pagoda: Coming to Terms with the Fall through Visual and Textual Representations
The Rise of the White Snake and Canonization of “The White Snake Modern”
Lu Xun’s Verdict and The Righteous Snake on the Silver Screen
The Pagoda in the Film
Concluding Remarks: The White Snake Modern
Part II Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War
Chapter 4. The White Snake Legend in Postwar Japanese Cinema
Exquisite Paradise and Forbidden Love in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu
Between Light and Shadow: Infinite Shades of Gray
Sound and Look of a Lady Wakasa Film: Pottery, Water, and Mutual Enchantment
White Pearl, Red Scarf, and “The Witchcraft of Love” in Byaku fujin no yōren
Red Scarf, Manifested Desire, and Significance of Color
Special Effects and Technologies of the “Witchcraft of Love”
From Hong Kong to Southeast Asia
Flowers, Animals, and Humans: Animating the White Snake Legend in Hakujaden
From Live-action to Animation
“Disney of the East” and Connections between China and Japan
Concluding Remarks: A Token of Love
Chapter 5. Reconfiguring the White Snake in Korean Cinema in an Inter-Asian Context
Sino-Korean Cinematic Connections
Shin Sang-ok and the 1960 Madam White Snake
The Shadow of Ugetsu and Holding Hands at First Sight
Dance to Seduce and Lovers’ Chat in a Moonlit Garden
Mutual Love and Devotion, and the Humanity of the Nonhuman
Humanity Aided by Special Effects
Shin’s Forgotten Second Attempt at a “White Snake” Film: Snake Woman in 1969
A Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan Coproduction? Love of the White Snake in 1978
The Taiwan Connection in the Context of a Hong Kong-Singapore Cinematic Matrix
Concluding Remarks: The Korean Connection in an Inter-Asian Context
Part III. The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture
Chapter 6. Dancing White Snake, Writing Green Snake: Reconfiguring the Legend in Mainland China and Hong Kong
Writing and Dancing, the Text and the Body
The Expressiveness of the Hybrid Body and the Iconoclasm of the Green Snake
Writing Women of China
A Dancing White Snake: Centered on the “Untold Stories”
Writing, Dancing, and the Cultural Revolution as Memory and Imagination
Concluding Remarks: Lingering Echoes
Chapter 7. The White Snake Legend in the United States in the Twenty-First Century:
Opera, Drama, and Digital Video
From Chinese Legend to Pulitzer-Prize Winning Western Opera: Madame White Snake
Green Snake the Storyteller
Righteousness against Love, Truth against Freedom
The Singaporean and Mainland Chinese Origins
The Powers and Possibilities of Mary Zimmerman’s The White Snake
The Wuzhen Experience
More Inspirations from Kentucky Students
A Female Writer of Socialist China: Zhao Qingge and Her 1956 Novel
The CTC Production in Washington D. C.
Poetry, Photography, and Fashion: Digital Challenges from Indrani
Chapter 8. Nothing Ever Dies: The Eternal Bodies of the White Snake
Korean Webtoon Lady White and Her Afterlife in Chinese
The Return of the Powerful Hybrid in the 2019 Internet Drama Legend of White Snake
Queering an Icon, Becoming a Demon in the 2019 Animation White Snake: The Legend Begins
Everlasting Bodily Memory: From the 1992 New Legend of Madame White Snake to the 2016 Star of Tomorrow
The Bodies of the Green Snake and the White Snake
Concluding Remarks: The Multiplicity and Openness of the Eternal Bodies of the Snake Women
Notes
Selected Chronological List of White Snake Texts
Selected Bibliography
Glossary
Index
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