The Global White Snake by Liang Luo (review)

Abstract

Liang Luo’s The Global White Snake is a timely addition to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on the “nonhuman turn” that has emerged in the twenty-first century. This is also the first book-length study to examine the remaking of the White Snake legends in the contemporary world. In her first monograph, The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China, Luo discussed the White Snake’s transformations from the early years of the Republic of China to the first decade of the People’s Republic of China. In The Global White Snake, Luo consciously takes a “peripheral” approach by examining the White Snake legends in spaces outside mainland China. The author’s multilingual ability allows her to trace the global travels of the White Snake legends in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English productions. The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the White Snake legends, which have traveled around the world as stories of hybridity, boundary-crossing, antiauthoritarianism, and gender politics. The rest of the seven chapters are divided into three parts: “The White Snake at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” “The Profound Humanity of the Nonhuman during the Cold War,” and “The Specter of the Past in Contemporary Popular Culture.” In part one, chapter 2 includes discussions of American missionary Samuel Woodbridge’s and American diplomat Frederick D. Cloud’s translations of the White Snake legend around the turn of the twentieth century. Both Woodbridge and Cloud mistook the continuity of the White Snake legend as a sign of China’s static culture. However, Luo points out that from the 1870s to the 1920s, the White Snake legend had already assumed a new life in China thanks to “technological breakthroughs in theatrical representation, shifting performative paradigms regarding gender roles, and sociopolitical debate over what was considered normative” (p. 48). In chapter 3, Luo shows how the boundary between fantasy and reality dissolved as the White Snake was released to the Chinese cultural imagination after the sensational fall of the Leifeng Pagoda in 1924. During this period, the avant-garde, the commercial, and the popular formed a concerted effort to capitalize on the pagoda’s visuality. The two chapters in part two examine the inter-Asian network of the White Snake industry through a set of films, including Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu (1953); Madame White Snake (Byaku fujin no yōren, 1956); the Japanese animation Hakujaden (which was distributed in the United States in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent); two Korean-language films, Madam White Snake (Paeksa buin, 1960) and Snake Woman (Sanyŏ, 1969); and Love of the White Snake (Paeksajŏn, 1978). Through nuanced close reading, Luo shows that “the humanity of the nonhuman continued to emerge as the central trope in White Snake adaptations throughout the Cold War” (p. 142), which served to heal the postwar trauma, as well as suture the geopolitical division in Asia. Part three contains three chapters. Chapter 6 shows how theWhite Snake legends transmuted into stories of resisting the institution of patriarchy, heterosexuality, and authoritarianism in Hong Kong writer Lilian Lee’s fiction “Green Snake” and Chinese American writer Yan Geling’s “White Snake.” Chapter 7 discusses the multilocational and multilingual popular cultural phenomena and media events of the White Snake legends in three Anglophone productions—Zhou Long’s opera Madame White Snake (2011), Mary Zimmerman’s play The White Snake (2012), and the short digital video The Legend of Lady White Snake (2013). Chapter 8, “The Eternal Bodies of the White Snake,” explores the hybrid