Suzanne E. Wright’s “Playing Cards for Drinking Games: Literary Paradigms for Performative Play” discusses woodblock printed playing cards for drinking games of the late Ming- and early Qing-dynasties. The game is inherently performative with the text on the cards instructing the participants what actions to take and how much to drink. Performance is also explicitly referenced in the pictorial content of some cards that depict characters or scenes from dramas and novels. Performative play may be seen as one aspect of a broader trend toward association and identification with historical figures and reenactment of dramatic, literary, or anecdotal events in the late imperial period. Through imitative acts, a resonance is attempted between the bodies of the players, the depicted bodies on the cards, and, in some cases, the bodies of those depicted in the images – an expression of embodied culture that marries the physical, the pictorial and the historical.
Continuing the theme of performance, Jiayi Chen’s “Banqueting through Improvisation: The Game of Hiding the Hook and the Qing Court Theater” explores the theatrical representation of the game of canggou (hiding the hook) in a comedy sketch Canggou jiaqing at the Qing court. A game involving two teams, canggou required a member from one team to hold a small hook or an equivalent in their hand, and the other team to guess its placement despite continuous verbal and gestural distractions from their opponents. Chen argues that while the short drama turned a celebratory banquet into a scripted and stylized performance, the game transcended the boundary of reality and fictionality, everydayness and festivity by (re)foregrounding actors’ improvision. In this way, Canggou jiaqing reflects the innovative potential of such understudied short performances at the Qing court by inviting both actors and spectators to play with each other and join the celebration together.
Moving to the genre of fiction, Rania Huntington’s “A Laughing Flower’s Guide to the Party: Knowledge, Pleasure, and Pattern in Flowers in a Mirror” reads a nineteenth-century novel notorious for slowing down the plot in its second half, allowing its hundred heroines, all flower spirits exiled from heaven, to enjoy a days-long party filled with an exhaustive catalog of erudite amusements. This paper examines an ostensibly minor character who acts as the reader’s guide to the party. Wandering from game to game, asking questions that allow her sisters to flaunt their knowledge, she is a structural solution to the problem of presenting a party with an excess of simultaneous games. The author Li Ruzhen has conceived her, beyond this narrative function, as an embodiment of play, laughter, and curiosity. Her path through the party and interaction with each of games played reveals Li’s conception of celebration and the part knowledge plays in it.
Li Guo’s “Ludic Heroines, Feminine Mirth: The Courtesans’ Drinking Games in The Dream in the Green Bower”studies women’s experiments with jiuling, drinking games, and representations of courtesans as ludic heroines in The Dream in the Green Bower (preface 1878), a novel by Yu Da (?–1884). In Yu’s text, the courtesans’ reinvention of drinking games introduces readers to a mesmerizing social tableau of game, leisure, and entertainment of nineteenth century. Ludic enactments following eminent characters create situations of mise-en-abyme and mimicry, which obfuscate the secondary reality of the gameworld and heighten the irreducible difference between the dreamworld of joviality and the impermanence of the characters’ lives. If the novel is a dreamworld of ludic diversions, it is the courtesans who preconceive the conditions of play, determine their actions in gambling with fate, and set the mechanism of the game, be it the game of life or a blithe pastime.
Presentations will be limited to 12 minutes each to allow more than twenty minutes for discussion.