UCLA

Engaging with theories of Sinophone studies, national cinema, and transnational cinema, this dissertation centers on ethnic minorities in China to address the dynamic interactions among discourses representing the nation-state, the Han, ethnic minorities, and the rest of the world from 1949 to 1999 through the lens of film. Instead of following the common approach heavily relying on storytelling and narrative studies, I turn to the less-studied non-narrative strategies to scrutinize the functions of opening sequences, props, and set design. I argue that socialist minority films made in the seventeen-year period (1949–1966) cinematically engendered socialist reforms in minority geopolitics, spaces, and bodies; integrated minorities into the Han-centered nation-state; and spread images and social statuses of ethnic minorities that aligned with the national discourse. This dissertation also extends into extra-diegesis to spotlight how ethnic minorities reacted toward their assigned positions, something absent in prior scholarship. By examining minorities’ roles as authors in scriptwriting and actors in film performance during the seventeen-year period, I argue that minorities could maintain limited agency by somewhat negotiating with the national discourse and partly straying from the national interpellation and the constructed personas and identities. Moreover, while prior scholarship generally studies minority films within the context of China, I investigate the transnational and translocal flows of socialist minority films and the adaptations of these films outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1950s and 1960s. In the transnational and translocal consumption of these films, the socialist discourse embedded within was often deconstructed. In addition, socialist minority films provided a space for non-PRC moviegoers and filmmakers to discuss local geopolitical, social, and identity issues. In the early post-socialist era, a broad spectrum of minority films emerged to challenge the pattern of representation established during the period of high socialism; this new wave was spearheaded by trends of genre hybridization and commercialization of the Chinese film industry. I am therefore studying minority films produced in the 1980s and 1990s to build an argument that the Han filmmakers could use the marginal position of minorities as a weapon to criticize Han-centric notions of national discourse.