Foreign Languages and Cultures
Christopher Lupke
How Chinese Literature and Film Represent Ethnicity and National Identity

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Literature and film are not transparent windows into the reality they depict. They are carefully shaped and edited to elicit very specific responses from their audiences. In modern Chinese literature, for example, one theme many writers are preoccupied with is the problem of authenticity. Who can speak for the people of China? This issue resonates through a variety of literary works that depict the experiences of the Chinese people from the peasant-inhabited countryside, to bustling urban environments, and even throughout the diaspora.

Dr. Lupke has been fascinated with this problem and explores the way it is articulated in literature and film. His research suggests that no writer is the ultimate arbiter of national identity, but that it is precisely the tenuous and questionable assertions of cultural artifacts such as purity or pedigree that are most skillfully crafted in the literary or cinematic work.

Chinese intellectuals of the past one hundred years have sought to reconstruct a sense of who they are through their cultural artifacts. Thus, the theme of “filiality,” a traditional component of Chinese belief in which one does not fully become a “self” until having married and begotten at least one son, is a recurring motif in the works of a vast array of writers as well as film directors. These aesthetic representations are one step removed from the social reality of China, according to Dr. Lupke’s research. And that is what makes them so fascinating: each work is its own individual invention and much of the value is found in the ingenuity of its style, above and beyond the subject matter of the work.

Dr. Lupke’s research into Chinese literature and culture has broad implications for understanding Chinese society in general, as well as for understanding the rhetorical methods in which ethnicity and identity are portrayed in various creative modes. He plans to expand his research to cover majors works of the entire late imperial and modern era in China, inquiring into the fundamental nature of what it is to be Chinese as that question is highlighted in literature and film.

Contact Information
Christopher Lupke, Ph.D.
Assitant Professor
Foreign Langauges and Cultures

Washington State University
PO Box 642610
Pullman, WA 99164-2610

Telephone: 509-335-2755
E-mail: lupke@wsu.edu