Barbara Mittler Research Trajectory
Once upon a time, I really wanted to become a practicing musician, which is one of the reasons why I wrote a dissertation dealing with Chinese music (Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China since 1949), catalogued and copied a huge collection of New Chinese Music for the library of our Institute (C. C. Liu Collection or the Liu Yuan Collection) and continue to organize talks, concerts, exhibitions and conferences featuring music from greater China (e.g. Creative Couples - Transcultural Media, Chime Conferences 25 years apart ). Lately I have started a very fruitful cooperation with Klangforum Heidelberg (e.g. Neue Klänge aus dem Reich der Mitte,1968 Global [...], Fälle von Wasser ) which even enabled us to stage a contemporary Chinese opera by Lam Bun-Ching: WENJI (see ZERRISSEN—Auf der Suche nach Heimat [Youtube]).
One of my current book projects, too, “And there is only one Lang Lang…”—Chinese Musicians on the Global Stage: a Transcultural Perspective takes up on this interest of mine: reading the fate of classical music in China and considering a variety of different “Chinese” musical practices, in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan and among American-born Chinese, also touching upon some of the more unexpected faces that classical music has taken—as revolutionary music, classical jazz, and music for the Chinese orchestra, for example—the book will uncover the tensions inherent in this dynamic process of re-creating classical music à la Chinoise, and suggest new ways of interpreting it. For as Chinese musicians are making their inroads on concert stages all over the world, coupled with admiration for their incredible skills and accomplishments is often resignation or even fear. The heated reactions to the publication of Amy Chua’s Battle hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) which caused a long debate on proper ways of educating children in the US (and music in the hands of China as an “Olympic Discipline”) are only one example (see this lecture “Wagner goes East—Chinese Encounters with European Opera”).
All throughout, not just in my work on music, I have attempted to consider different parts of greater China. This interest of mine has led to an engagement for the teaching of the history, society, language and culture of greater China which has been generously supported for many years from many different sources and which has enabled the institute to host the Taiwan Lecture Series devoted to Taiwan and Greater China, inviting prominent scholars, artists and activists to share their work and experience with Heidelberg colleagues and students.
Next to my interest in music in greater China, it is the early Chinese print media that I have focused on in my research: a variation of my Habilitation Thesis(A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in Shanghai's News Media (1872-1912) now also published in Chinese as 报为中用？—上海新闻媒体的影响力、定位与变革（1872—1912) ) is based on an analysis of articles taken from a Shanghai newspaper, the Shenbao 申報, founded in 1872 by a British businessman, Ernest Major. This study attempts to show how the foreign medium newspaper was transformed to fit the taste of its Chinese readerships, by incorporating the Chinese court gazette on its pages, by using authoritative citations from the Chinese Classics, and by adapting Chinese literary forms such as zhiguai 志怪 (records of the strange) or the examination essay (baguwen 八股文). The book also addresses the question of the implied readerships of this newspaper by surveying the role of women and of the inhabitants of Shanghai. Finally, it asks whether or not this particular Shanghai newspaper, and many of the newspapers that followed in its wake, were indeed responsible for the development of a Chinese nationalism in Shanghai. The book thus questions the fundamental assumption reiterated since the publication of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities that newspapers were indeed powerful agents in the formation of (Chinese) nationalism and the (Chinese) public sphere.
One of the larger projects that I have been involved in since 2008, is a study of women's and entertainment magazines in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan from their beginnings in the final years of the 19th century to the present day. This project was accompanied by a number of research seminars introducing and reading Chinese (women's) magazines, co-taught with Zhu Junzhou. One of the outcomes of the project is an edited volume (Hockx, M., Judge, J., Mittler, B. (Eds.). (2018). Women and the Periodical Press in China's Long Twentieth Century: A Space of their Own? Cambridge) which elaborates our new methodology of reading the early Chinese printing press through what we call vertical, horizontal, situated and integrated reading approaches. Using the same methodology, I am preparing a book Portrait(s) of a Trope: New Women and New Men in Chinese Women’s Magazines, 1898-2008. This book traces the historical development of women’s magazines in China, their global interactions as circulating media constantly reproducing from other media, and their translations into action by and through the opening up of new readerships. It discusses in particular, their powers in the making and the remaking of a particular trope, the figure of the New (Wo)Man, and its inscription into Chinese cultural memory.
In cooperation with Joan Judge at York University and the Heidelberg Research Architecture at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS, formerly the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a global Context”), the project has, in addition, also built a substantive database of women’s magazines (WOMAG) which, more recently has been expanded to include entertainment and literary magazines as well (ECPO Early Chinese Periodicals Online).
Sparked by my readings of the eclectic and all-encompassing print media and magazines of the late 19th and early 20th century, I have paid a lot of attention to visual materials. From a joint research project on Asian Satire with colleagues studying India, the Middle East and East Asia under the auspices of the Heidelberg Cluster Asia and Europe in a Global Context, stems a study on Asian Punches(Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Hans Harder & Barbara Mittler eds.) Heidelberg: Springer 2013).
All the while, I had been absorbed in a project of rewriting of the history of cultural production during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the results of which became a book entitled A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture(with an accompanying online database). While it is often (and officially) stated that the Cultural Revolution was nothing but a period of cultural stagnation and as the 8 so-called model works (yangbanxi 样板戏)—of which, indeed, there were 18 (cf. list of the 18 yangbanxi)—are taken as paradigmatic for the entirety of Cultural Revolution Culture, they are condemned as an aberration in terms of cultural development. The comfortable assumption, however, that the Cultural Revolution was simply a distorted and atypical phase of political extremism, distinct from the years before and after that “unfortunate period,” is misleading. The yangbanxi are everything else but the product of an iconoclastic, and xenophobic era as which the Cultural Revolution is so often described. Instead, they are manifestations of a hybrid taste which calls for the transformation of Chinese tradition according to once-foreign standards, a taste which for a century has led to the creation of a Chinese culture of foreign imprint. The model works are thus not to be considered the perversion of the Maoist experiment of re-inventing a new, Chinese but revolutionary, culture, but have an important place in a long series of attempted syntheses of foreign and Chinese heritage. It is one of the aims of this book, as well as the conference-cum-exhibition Rethinking Cultural Revolution Culture to show that the model works and other cultural products (such as poetry, short stories, novels, posters, songs, music, paintings, film) (re-)created during the Cultural Revolution are indeed much less a deviant than the norm of orthodox cultural production in revolutionary China and, what is more important, to explain that and how they remain significant (and even popular) in China today (see e.g. Mao Zedong – Pop-Ikone und YouTube-Star, , and Living the Cultural Revolution. Impact Events and the Making of Cultural Memory). More recently, we have also reconsidered the global trajectory of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in a large-scale retrospective, including an exhibition, a film festival, and a lecture and concert series (Facetten des Erinnerns:1968 global—China und die Welt).