Red Chambers and Electric Rainbows: Postsocialist Televisualities
Red Chambers and Electric Rainbows: Postsocialist Televisualities
This talk traces the emergence of television as a consumer object in China's New Era (1978-
1989), where it becomes indexical of new modes modernity and futurity. I examine televisual
materialities, both the precarious, accident-prone wiring of this desirable domestic object
and the flickering light of the electronic image on its glass screen and their impact on the
urban media ecology of the 1980s. I read the emergence of black and white television as a
futurological desire in the cinema of the 1950s and the literature of the late Cultural
Revolution in the 1970s. Tracking the shift from collective to private domestic viewing that
occurs throughout the decade, the dissertation examines CCTV’s 1987 showcase of new color
televisual aesthetics, the 36-episode adaptation of China’s most famous vernacular novel, the
18th century chronicle of material excess and historical downfall, The Dream of the Red
Chamber 红楼梦. The novel’s famous rhetoric of desire and illusion mediates Chinese
consumers’ encounters with the new medium of television, playing perfectly to the fraught
status of the color TV as a desirable but prohibitively expensive commodity. I situate my
analysis against ideas about television’s medium specificity and propose multiple modes of
Chinese televisuality that point both to the big screen aesthetics of immersion and the
participatory pleasures of the domestic monitor.
About Dr. Keblinska
Julia Keblinska received her PhD in Chinese, with a Designated Emphasis in the Department
of Film & Media, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Her dissertation, "New
Era, New Media: The Postsocialist Chinese Media Ecology," is a media archaeology of China's
early postsocialist moment. In her current role as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ohio State
University's Center for Historical Research, she is developing her dissertation as a
comparative research project that reads the historical shift of postsocialism in Poland and in
China through film and media history. In addition to her main area of focus, China, she has
presented and published on Polish and Korean film and television.