Jie Li, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Fairbank Center Faculty Affiliate, uses a range of media approaches to teach her undergraduate students at Harvard. Her most popular course, East Asian Cinema, enrolled as many as 170 students last time it was offered, and often features innovative methods — such as asking students to make their own films in the style of the directors they study.
Professor Li’s work focuses on film and media studies as well as cultural history, and her latest book, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (2023, Columbia University Press), won the 2024 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. In the spring, she was named a Harvard College Professor, in recognition of her commitment to undergraduate teaching, and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for her contributions to the advancement of scholarship in the fields of literature, history or art.
This summer, Professor Li added to her already busy year by taking her passion for teaching on the road: As Faculty Director of the new, six-week Harvard Summer School Program in China, Li is introducing 14 Harvard undergraduates — many of whom had never been to China before — to the cultural history of Shanghai, her hometown.
Professor Li, who earned both her A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard, checked-in with us from Shanghai to share thoughts on her new book, the joys of teaching, and summer school.
Congratulations on your new book, Cinematic Guerrillas! Tell us a bit about the book and why you chose this subject?
Thank you! This book is a media history of film exhibition and reception in Socialist China. I use “cinematic guerrillas” to refer to onscreen militants in Chinese revolutionary films, mobile projectionists who brought cinema to the countryside off-the-power-grid, and unruly moviegoers not so easily brainwashed by propaganda. I chose the topic because I am curious about how propaganda works and what people do with and to it, and because cinema was most impactful in China between the 1950s and 1970s. For example, Chapter 1 explores how cinema contributed to nation-building, enhanced Mao’s personality cult, and helped industrialize and militarize the masses. Chapter 2 focuses on several generations of projectionists and unpacks the baggage they carried. Chapter 3 zooms in onto the famous “Three Sisters Movie Team,” to discuss the gaps between propaganda and reality. Chapter 4 focuses on economic practices, asking what rural cinema cost, how it was paid for, and who paid for it. Chapter 5 parses the sensorium of open-air cinema into “extra-filmic” sights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch. Chapter 6 considers audience reception of war films, spy thrillers, and bitter melodramas. Chapter 7 studies the Chinese reception of popular foreign films, especially Soviet biopics, North Korean tearjerkers, Albanian coming-of-age romances, and Indian musicals. Chapter 8 turns to film censorship and criticism, especially Madame Mao’s cinematic vaccination campaigns to expose so-called “poisonous weed films” to the public, in order to build up their “intellectual immunity.”
What are some of the key points you make in the book?
By focusing on “cinematic guerrillas,” my book seeks to recenter human agency and creativity even when mass media were explicitly used for ideological indoctrination. I also consider socialist propaganda “revolutionary spirit mediumship,” whereby projectionists served as ritual specialists who hosted communions with revolutionary martyrs, divined communist futures, and exorcized class enemies. Meanwhile, media reception was often enmeshed with local religiosities, especially when screenings were held at spaces of worship, such as ancestral halls, temples, and churches.
You were recently named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of your commitment to teaching undergraduates. Tell us a bit about why you like teaching undergrads and why you think it’s important.
I know colleagues who are Harvard College Professors and am most honored and humbled to join their ranks. It has been a real pleasure to teach undergraduates who are so brilliant, curious, and diverse in their intellectual orientations. I particularly enjoy curating creative assignments where students can collaborate and pool their skills and talents in writing, acting, music, and photography. The more dominant AI becomes in our lives, the more I want students to work with one another as human beings and to give expression to their imaginations. In this process, I believe I learn as much from them as they learn from me.
You’re also leading the new summer school program in Shanghai. What made you decide to take on that role?
I have been a professor of East Asian Studies for more than a decade, but never had the opportunity to teach in East Asia, so I really embraced the opportunity to bring students to China. I grew up in Shanghai in the 1980s and 1990s, but every time I come back, I feel as if I am arriving in a new city and country. My first book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2014), excavated a century of memories from the neighborhoods of my parents and grandparents before they were demolished in the 2000s. The first draft was written as my undergraduate thesis and most of the research done over the summer before in Shanghai, combining oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork, and documentary filmmaking with literary and historical analysis. By leading a new summer school program in my hometown, I am hoping that students can also compare their first-hand experiences and conversations with literary and cinematic representations of this city, as well as academic studies in the humanities and social sciences.
What do you hope to accomplish with your students?
I hope to develop their historical consciousness, even as they explore this futuristic metropolis, to sharpen their critical capacities for analyzing what they see and hear (and smell, touch, and taste), and to unleash their creative talents through making films or podcasts, writing fiction or nonfiction, or conducting field research. Their assignments can draw on the themes and styles of the writers and directors we study, our organized excursions to various exhibitions and performances, as well as their own everyday encounters and explorations of the city.
For many of these summer school students, this will be their first time in China. What do you hope they will take home with them?
I am hopeful that our students will take home a much more embodied, vivid, and nuanced understanding of China than what they can gain from consuming mainstream Western media, or even from reading academic articles. After all, nothing can substitute for face-to-face human interactions and unmediated sensory intake of the sights, sounds, smells, taste, and feel of a foreign country. Some of our Chinese-American students are also (re)connecting with their Chinese heritage and relatives for the first time. Apart from keeping up their interest in China, and maintaining the relationships they’ve built here, I also hope that this summer can embolden our students to explore other unfamiliar cultures and places in the years to come.