MANHUA MODERNITY: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn. By John A. Crespi. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020. xiv, 197 pp. (Illustrations.) US$34.95, paper; free ebook [Luminos Open Access]. ISBN 978-0-520-30910-4.
John Crespi’s Manhua Modernity: Chinese Culture and the Pictorial Turn contributes to the expanding scholarship on Chinese manhua and print visual culture in the first half of twentieth-century China. Conceptually, Crespi is reserved from taking manhua as the synonym of the English words “cartoons” and “comics.” Instead, he approaches manhua within the trinity of manhua, magazine, and modernity. This view highlights manhua’s “heterogeneity and seriality” (65) in periodicals whereby individual works form “an interactive matrix of images and text” (27) showcasing the modern everyday. Such a conceptual expansion allows a more holistic view of manhua in reflecting as well as constructing modernity and a sense of community through the act of mass viewing. However, this expanded view has its own limitations. In the epilogue, Crespi admits that his approach to manhua as periodicals has neglected other manhua publication formats and forms. Within the corpus of manhua magazines and the manhua production practices among key artists of the time, Crespi has excellently demonstrated how those works shape modern living and readers’ worldviews, though they are also strongly steered by the shifting social and political milieu in China over the concerned periods.
Methologically, Crespi first draws on W. J. T. Mitchell’s call for what pictures want rather than what they do to analyze the evolving agency of manhua magazines to understand the power relationship between pictures, institutions, and readers. Emphasizing what pictures want also sensitizes the methods of “horizontal reading” (14); and treating manhua as “metapictures” (59) in order to heuristically establish links between the interactive mix of discrete manhua on the magazine page to the socio-political background. These methods signal Crespi’s methodological departure from what he claims is the “standard practice” (42) of selecting individual works for close readings in the existing research on manhua in the mid-twentieth century. This does not mean that close reading is abandoned in this book. On the contrary, close readings appear in all the chapters to support the author’s argument of reading manhua inseparable from its magazine format in depicting modernity, as best illustrated in the first chapter (figure 10).
When it comes to manhua in the tumultuous Republican, wartime, and early communist eras, again, Crespi avoids following the major scholarship that prioritizes the political and ideological forces dominating the manhua production scene. He has chosen to look at the alternative or “shadow” visual history of manhua (143). For example, he emphasizes the selected manhua periodicals’ consistent nature of representing heterogeneous everyday experience, regardless of the shifting political projections.
Manhua as metapictures are succinctly elucidated in the chapters which are chronologically divided into four ideologically and politically distinct periods. Chapter 1 concerns the pivotal establishment of the Manhua Society in 1926 and the publication of Shanghai Sketch from 1928–1930. Crespi proposes a revisionist look at the Society and the magazine that existed predominantly for commercial purposes, while political manhua only constituted one part of the pictorial miscellany. Shanghai Sketch, following earlier Westernized manhua periodicals such as Dianshizhai Pictorial in the late nineteenth century, mainly served as “a guide to the art of everyday life” (38) in the global and cosmopolitan city of pre-1937 Shanghai.
Chapter 2 investigates Resistance Sketch published in the post-1937 resistance period by key Manhua Society members who became refugee artists. Keeping in mind the power of the magazine in shaping and reshaping readers’ sense of community and collective identity, Crespi suggests that some manhua from Resistance Sketch have reconfigured the mentality of the manhua reading community by staging a cultural rite of passage to war.
Chapter 3 focuses on Zhang Guangyu’s Manhua Journey to the West and the corresponding exhibition tour in 1945–1947. Initially unpublished but exhibited in original plates due to shortage of resources and stringent Kuomintang censorship, this 60-panel manhua narrative is more akin to traditional illustrated picture stories (lianhuanhua) and political manhua. Crespi continues with his alternative reading of the work not simply as political satire. He believes Zhang “transposes the visual idiom of the picture magazine to his satirical manhua” (101). Such an association to the magazine publication is relatively indirect if the reader has not followed through the arguments developed from the previous chapters.
Chapter 4 analyzes the state-sponsored Manhua yuekan in 1950–1960. Though this periodical successfully redefined the everyday modernity and constructed a Communist nationalistic grand narrative, Crespi has convincingly traced its inherited legacy of the manhua magazine. For instance, micronarratives remain clearly visible in Manhua yuekan and the reader at the time could still catch a glimpse of the Western popular culture like the way readers of Shanghai Sketch did in the previous decades, despite the Western contents having been turned into anti-American propaganda.
In short, this book has brought a new angle to look at old manhua. It has enriched the current scholarship not only on early modern Chinese manhua but also on broader fields of visual cultural studies and Sinology. With an electronic version for open access, this richly illustrated book caters for both academic research needs and leisure reading.
Kin-Wai Chu
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven