Staging Personhood: Costuming in Early Qing Drama

Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglements between Chinese drama and nascent Manchu rule in seventeenth-century China, revealing not just how political and ethnic conflicts shaped theatrical costuming, but also the ways in which costuming enabled different modes of identity negotiation during the dynastic transition.