From "Minority Film" to "Minority Discourse": Questions of Nationhood and Ethnicity in Chinese Cinema

In recent years, cultural critics have returned to the relationship between nationhood and ethnicity with a renewed sense of urgency if not anxiety. This has been, in part, to critique the established paradigms and epistim's (such as the centerperiphery and the majority-minority) and, in part, to reconfigure the geopolitical space in the contemporary world. This study seeks to investigate the functioning of a set of critical categories-ethnicity, race, nation-state-as well as other related terms, such as nation-people, nationalism, state discourse, cultural hegemony, and subjectivity, in the field of Chinese cinema. Proceeding from minority (shaoshu minzu dianying) as a special genre in mainland China to minority as a critical practice in New Chinese Cinema,' I will demonstrate that the categories of the nation and ethnicity have been put to use through a complex process of negotiation in Chinese cinema from the early 1920s to the present. Two levels of such negotiation can be differentiated at this point: the level of filmic discourse (i.e., film narrative and narration) and the level of critical discourse (i.e., film theory and criticism). I shall start with the second level in order to identify issues of crucial importance and then return to the first level by way of reading a number of films that illuminate these issues.