Space, Self, and Society (The Genesis and Genealogy of Street Performers on the)

Author: Yue Yongyi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Today's Tianqiao Art is a bustling Tianqiao artist, a Tianqiao artist surrounded by crowds, and a Tianqiao artist with considerable status and prestige. Without personally witnessing the hardships of the once "baking cakes on flat ground" Tianqiao artists, I sincerely rejoice for today's "Tianqiao artists." As people in the world of daily life, although today's "Tianqiao artists" still undergo special skill training, after more than a century of transformation, pain, self-exile, and reconstruction, they no longer have to be like amphibians, simultaneously accepting the dual values and ethics of mainstream and marginal societies, and nervously and laboriously navigating between two societies with vastly different rules of the game, despite the fact that new groups are now being pushed to the fringes and bottom of society. The book vividly portrays the footsteps, growth journey, and related narratives of today's "Tianqiao artists" ancestors. For a long period in history, in fact until before the liberation, these former street performers were a group that was scorned, ignored, yet also played with, but remained obscure. Therefore, in a certain sense, this book is a rewriting of oral history, based primarily on the oral materials I myself recorded, secular memoirs, autobiographies, others' accounts, and compiled oral materials. This makes the book's description of "local knowledge" (local knowledge) — a kind of knowledge that is narrated, spoken, and written — and the author's writing becomes an interpretation of "the interpretation of others' interpretations," including the artists themselves, of this knowledge that is repeatedly narrated, spoken, and written. Of course, there are also questions about "the self."
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